"No good!" sighed Jud. "Might as well look the thing in the face,
fellows. Here we stay, and eat up all our grub, day after day. Ain't it
fierce, though? How d'ye suppose we'll ever stand it? If anybody had a
pair of wings now, and could fly ashore, we might get help to pull us
out. But we couldn't use our wigwag flags, even if we tried, because
who'd see 'em? Oh! what tough luck!"

Paul may have felt somewhat discouraged himself, but he was not the
fellow to betray the fact--so early in the game, at least.

"Well, Jud," he said, soberly, "perhaps we may have to stick it out
here for a while, but I hope it won't be as bad as you say. And make
up your mind that if we do, it'll be a mighty strange thing, with
eighteen wide awake scouts to think up all sorts of schemes and dodges
that we can try."

"That's the stuff, Paul!" exclaimed Phil Towns. "Every fellow ought to
get right down to hard pan, and try to think up some way of beating this
old sticky mud. What's the use of being scouts, if we let a little thing
like this get the better of us? If I could only wade ashore, I'd fix a
hawser to a tree back there, and then by workin' the engine p'raps we
might pull the boat off. I've seen 'em do that with a steamboat, away
down on Indian River, when I was with my folks in Florida last winter.
And it worked, too."

"Well, try the wading; it looks fine!" laughed Joe Clausin.

"Don't think of it," called out Gusty Bellows at that moment. "I stuck
this pole down in the soft slush, and my stars! it goes right through to
China, I reckon. Anyhow, I couldn't reach bottom. And if you jumped over,