u," panted Le Marchant in a
shaky voice.

"And I thought it was you."

We bent together and lifted the fallen one to solid ground, but it was too
dark to see his face.

"Is he dead?"

"He is dead," I said, for I had laid my hand against his heart, and it was
still, and his flesh was clammy cold, and when we found him he was lying
face down in the mud.

"He escaped as we did, and wandered till he fell in here and was too weak
to rise. Let us go on;" and we joined hands, for the comfort of the living
touch, and went on our way more heavily than before.

We kept anxious look-out for lights or any sign of humanity. And lights
indeed we saw at times that night, and cowered shivering in ditches and
mudholes as they flitted to and fro about the marshes. For these, we knew,
were no earthly lights, but ghost flares tempting us to
destruction--stealthy pale flames of greenish-blue which hovered like
ghostly butterflies, and danced on the darkness, and fluttered from place
to place as though blown by unfelt winds. And one time, after we had left
the dead man behind, one such came dancing straight towards us, and we
turned and ran for our lives till we fell into a hole. For Le Marchant
vowed it was the dead man's spirit, and that the others were the spirits of
those who had died in similar fashion. But for myself I was not sure, for I
had seen similar lights on our masts at sea in the West Indies, though
indeed there was nothing to prove that they also were not the spirits of
drowned mariners.

CHAPTER XXVI

HOW WE FOUND A FRIEND IN NEED

But--"pas de rue sans but!" as we say in Sercq--there is no road but has an
ending. And, just as the dawn was softening the east, and when we were nigh
our last effort, we stumbled by sheerest accident on shelter, warmth, and
food,--and so upon life, for I do not think either of us could have carried
on much longer, and to have sunk down there in the marsh, with no hope of
food, must soon have brought us to an end.

It was Le Marchant who smelt it first.

"Carre," he said suddenly, "there is smoke," and he stood and sniffed like
a starving dog. Then I smelt it also, a sweet pleasant smell of burning,
and we sniffed together.

Since it came to us on the wind we followed up the wind in search of it,
and nosed about hither and thither, losing it, finding it, but getting
hotter and hotter on the scent till we came at last to a little mound, and
out of the mound the smoke came.