Everybody was plastered with mud, and they became
mere images of human beings.
In the afternoon they reached a sort of oasis in the terrible
swamp, and there they buried two more of their number who had
perished from exhaustion. The rest, save a few, lay upon the
ground as if dead. On all sides of them stretched the pines and
the soft black earth. It looked to the fugitives like a region
into which no human beings had ever come, or ever would come
again, and, alas! to most of them like a region from which no
human being would ever emerge.
Henry sat upon a piece of fallen brushwood near the edge of the
morass, and looked at the fugitives, and his heart sank within
him. They were hardly in the likeness of his own kind, and they
seemed practically lifeless now. Everything was dull, heavy, and
dead. The note of the wind among the leaves was somber. A long
black snake slipped from the marshy grass near his feet and
disappeared soundlessly in the water. He was sick, sick to death
at the sight of so much suffering, and the desire for vengeance,
slow, cold, and far more lasting than any hot outburst, grew
within him. A slight noise, and Shif'less Sol stood beside him.
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