egs went down as by suction.
The pony squirmed, heaved, wrestled in a frenzy, and churning the red
water about his master's thighs, went deeper and fared worse. With a
clangor of wings, the storks rose, a streaming rout against the sky,
trailed their tilted legs, filed away in straggling flight, like figures
interlacing on a panel. At the height of his distress, Rudolph caught a
whirling glimpse of the woman above him, safe on firm earth, easy in her
saddle, and laughing. Quicksand, then, was a joke,--but he could not
pause for this added bewilderment.

The pony, using a skill born of agony, had found somewhere a solid verge
and scrambled up, knee-deep, well out from the bank. With a splash,
Rudolph stood beside him among the tufts of salad green. As he patted
the trembling flanks, he heard a cry from the shore.

"Oh, well done!" she mocked them. "Well done!"

A gust of wholesome anger refreshed him. She might laugh, but now he
would see this folly through. He tore off his coat, flung it across the
saddle, waded out alone through the tussocks, and shooting forward full
length in the turbid water, swam resolutely for the island.

Sky and water brightened while he swam; and as he rose, wrapped in the
leaden weight of dripping clothes, the sun, before and above him,
touched wonderfully the quaggy bank and parched grasses. He lurched
ashore, his feet caked with enormous clods as of melting chocolate. A
filthy scramble left him smeared and disheveled on the summit. He had
come for nothing. The mound lay vacant, a tangled patch, a fragment of
wilderness.

Yet as he stood panting, there rose a puny, miserable sound. What
presence could lurk there? The distress, it might be, of some small
animal--a rabbit dying in a forgotten trap. Faint as illusion, a wail, a
thin-spun thread of sorrow, broke into lonely whimpering, and ceased. He
moved forward, doubtfully, and of a sudden, in the scrubby level of the
isle, stumbled on the rim of a shallow circular depression.

At first, he could not believe the discovery; but next instant--as at
the temple pond, though now without need of placard or interpreter--he
understood. This bowl, a tiny crater among the weeds, showed like some
paltry valley of Ezekiel, a charnel place of Herod's innocents, the
battlefield of some babes' crusade. A chill struck him, not from the
water or the early mists. In stupor, he viewed that savage fact.

Through the stillness of death sounded again the not