"They've tracked us, sure enough," said Wilkins. "Sharp's the word, lads, we may distance 'em yet, if we work hard. We'se run down t' water at a bonnie rate."
"I will watch and report their approach, while you all work at the boats," said Margaret. "Where shall I stand, Wilkins?"
"Just here, Miss," answered he, "aback of this thick bush. There's yer peep-hole; and shout when they get close up."
Margaret's first shout was a terrific one. "Arthur! Wilkins!" she cried in a frantic voice. "Oh! God help us! whither shall we flee? The wretches are firing the wood."
The savages, taking advantage of a north wind, had fired the long dry grass—a common practice with the natives. It was already fiercely blazing, and rushing towards the wood with resistless fury. The ground on which the travellers had encamped, and the spot where the young men were working, they had fortunately cleared for beds, and for seats in the boats; and now, while Jack and Arthur finished the canoes, the rest cut down the brushwood round, and flung it into the river, leaving a space of twenty or thirty yards wide quite cleared. But beyond that rose the lofty trees, that, once blazing, must shower down destruction on them.
Already the crackling of the trees announced that the conflagration was begun in the woods, and that no time must be lost, if they hoped to escape from it. Flights of white cockatoos, of bright-colored parrots, and glittering bronze pigeons, rose screaming from their desolated homes, and affrighted opossums sprang from their nests, swung on the trees, or fell senseless with the smoke on the ground. But in this time one canoe was completed and launched, with the women, all the baggage, and Mr. Mayburn and Hugh to direct it. They had been swept down the river to a considerable distance from the fire before the second canoe, imperfectly completed, whirled off with the rest of the family, who reached their friends at a point of safety, with wild looks and scorched hair.
Then they all rested a moment, to look back on the terrific and still spreading conflagration, by the red light of which they saw the frightful outline of the dark forms, among whom, though now naked, and scarcely less dark than the rest, they distinguished the muscular and ungraceful form of Peter, which strangely contrasted with the stately, slender, and agile forms of the natives.
"He's not lit on them t' other rangers yet," said Wilkins. "That's a good job, onyhow; for, ye see, they'd horses, and we'd fairly been hunted down like foxes."
Augmented by the recent rains, the river flowed in an uninterrupted course, and before the evening and the calls of hunger induced them to arrest their flight, the grateful family believed they must have progressed twenty-five or thirty miles to the south-east, with very slight exertion, through new and lovely scenes of hill, vale, rocky mountains, and rich forests.
Then, on the margin of the river, beneath the shelter of a thick wood, they landed, to thank God for their escape, and to take rest. Mussels, a sort of cray-fish, and the river-cod, formed their supper, which was cooked in fear and trembling, lest the smoke of their fire should bring on them the savages, or the flames should spread to the brushwood, a catastrophe they now regarded with horror.