"Well," said Russ, increasing his pace, but not so much so as to leave Mun Bun and Margy very far behind, "if he wants help, of course he wants it bad. Oh! There's the swamp."
They came to the opening. There were a few trees here on either side of the road, which was now made of logs laid down on the soft ground. Grass grew between the logs. There were pools of water, and other pools of very black mud with only tufts of tall grass growing between them.
"Oh!" cried Rose, who had very bright eyes, "I see him!"
"Who do you see?" demanded Tad, who was turning around and trying to look all ways at once.
"There! Can't you see him?" demanded Rose, with growing excitement. "Oh, the poor thing!"
Just then an unmistakable "bla-a-at!" startled the other children--even Tad Munson. He brought his gaze down from the trees into the branches of which he had been staring.
"Bla-a-at!" was the repeated cry, which at first the children had thought had been "Help!"
"And sure enough," Russ said confidently, "he is saying 'help!' just as near as he can say it."
Russ began to whistle a tune, as he often did when he was puzzled. It was not that he was puzzled about the thing he saw--and which Rose had seen first--but at once Russ felt that he must discover a way to get the blatting object out of the mud.
"What do you know about that!" cried Tad Munson. "That's John Winsome's red calf. See! He's sunk clear to his backbone in the mud."
"Oh, dear me!" cried Rose. "The poor thing!"
She had said that twice before, but everybody was so excited that none of them noticed that Rose was repeating herself. In fact, both Vi and Margy said the very same thing, and in chorus:
"Is that a red calf, Tad Munson?" asked Laddie. "For if it is, it's a riddle. Its head and its neck and its tail are all splattered with mud."
"It was a red calf when it went into the swamp, all right," said Tad with confidence. "I know that calf, all right. And John Winsome told me only this morning that he had lost it."
"Who put it in that horrid swamp?" Vi demanded.
"And it is sinking down right now," Russ tried. "See it?"
Indeed the poor calf--a well grown animal--was in a very serious plight. It was eight or ten feet from the edge of the road where the logs were. And the calf had evidently struggled a good deal and was now quite exhausted. It turned its head to look at the children and blatted again.