I didn’t get started out with him until nearly sunset. That would make his being able to jump me and get away a lot more plausible, anyway; it’d naturally be easier in the dark.
He’d banged me with the oar, and when I came around I was in the bottom of the boat tied up like a pig with the anchor rope. It was dark and I was down there where I couldn’t see anything anyway, so I had no idea where he took me except that we went a long way. He put me ashore somewhere hours later, with my hands still tied, but not very tightly, and I’d managed to get them worked loose before daylight. The only thing, though, was that I was lost. I kept looking for the lake, and there wasn’t any; there was nothing but a thousand small sloughs and the marsh and flooded areas. After a while I’d run across some tracks and started following them, thinking somebody else was up here and I might find a cabin, and then I had lost my head completely when I found I was going in circles and that they were my own. They wouldn’t have any reason to doubt it; at least one man I knew of had been lost up here and never had found his way out. I shivered, thinking about it. I was taking a long chance. And not only of getting lost, either. I thought. Suppose they broke her down while I was in here?
I shook it off with rough impatience. It was just a chance I had to take. I lighted another cigarette, knowing that as soon as I swam the slough they’d be ruined anyway and I might as well use them up. Would I look as if I’d been lost up here for nearly seventy-two hours? Yes, there wasn’t much doubt that I’d look the part. My clothes were in ruin already and sweat-soaked and bloody from the cut on my head. Of course, I had shaved on Thursday morning, but I never had got around to it on Friday and would have a forty-eight hour growth of beard, ugly enough to convince anybody. All I had to do now was fight my way down through the swamp until I ran into some of the searchers. They would probably have a camp set up somewhere down there below and be firing guns, still hoping to guide me in. I listened now but there was no sound except that of the frogs.
The darkness was beginning to fade now and I could see the weed-choked dark water in front of me. I stood up, threw the flashlight out into the water, and waded in. Mud sucked at my feet and I pushed forward and started swimming. It was only a few strokes to the other side, where I climbed out and began beating my way through the brush again. Inside an hour I had lost track of the number if times I had to swim. I made no effort to turn aside when open water blocked my path, for it I didn’t move in a straight line I wouldn’t get out of here. When the sun came up I was able to check my direction, going due south with it on my left. My progress was agonizingly slow and the cut places on my head began to throb. Vines tripped me and I fell, and at times I had to wade for hundreds of yards through water and mud up to my waist. Most of the channels I had to swim were matted with pads, and the long, twining underwater stems wound around my arms and legs and threatened to pull me under. There was no way to know what time it was any more, for my watch was long since drowned and stopped, but the sun was climbing higher. As midday approached it was harder and harder to tell direction, for the sun was almost directly overhead.
Noon came and went and I was conscious now of beginning to weaken from hunger. I’d eaten nothing since Thursday night, and the back-breaking struggle and the heat were beginning to wear me down. Suddenly I was again in the midst of the piled windrow of down timber where the tornado had left its path through the swamp, and for a while my mind was black with panic. I was lost. I was going in circles and had come back to the place I