Tim lowered the gun as Pedro, grinning, came out of his concealment.
"That is the tree of the Raposa," Lourenço went on. "The lightning flashing in from above showed us the man. But now, senhores, I think we must tramp the bush for some time before we find that Raposa again. There is no trace of him here."
"Hm!" said Knowlton. Striding to the hollow tree, he peered about inside it. The cavity was almost big enough to sling a hammock in, but it was empty of any indication of habitation, human or otherwise. A temporary refuge—that was all.
"No sign anywhere around here, eh?" queried McKay.
"We have found none. We shall look farther, but I have small hope. If you senhores will make the camp this time we shall start at once and stay out until dark. Build no fire until we return. And if you hear the call of the mutum, pay no attention to it; we may use it to locate each other if we separate, and also perhaps as a decoy. Any wild man, red or white, hearing that call would seek the bird making it, for a fine fat mutum is well worth killing. Keep quiet and be on guard."
"Right. Go ahead."
The bushmen turned at once and stole away. The others returned to the canoes, transported the necessary duffle to the base of the hollow tree, made camp with a few poles, and squatted against the trunk to smoke, watch, and wait. Several times they heard mutum calls receding in the distance. Then came silence.
The sun-thrown shadows in the gap crawled steadily eastward. Knowlton tested the feed of his automatic, which, since its balkiness in the fight with the Peruvians, he had kept carefully oiled and free from the slightest speck of rust. Tim arose at intervals and paced up and down in sentry go, eyes and ears alert—a useless activity, but one which provided an outlet for his restless energy. McKay let his gaze rove over the small area visible from their post, studying the contours of the towering trunks, the prone giant whose fall had opened the hole in the leafy roof, the parasitical vines twined about other trees, the thin, outflung buttresses supporting the mighty columns—all familiar sights to him, but the only things to occupy his vision. So limned on his brain did the scene become that after a time he could close his eyes and see it in every important detail.
It might have been two hours after Pedro and Lourenço had departed—the shadows had grown much longer—when over McKay stole the feeling that he was being watched. He glanced at his companions and found that neither of them was looking at him. Knowlton, sitting with hands clasped around updrawn knees, was dozing. Tim, though wide awake, was staring absently at a fungus. The captain's eyes searched the short vistas all about, spying nothing new. Still the feeling persisted. Then all at once his roaming gaze stopped, became fixed on a point some forty feet away.
There rose a rough-barked red-brown tree, and from it, near the ground, projected a blackish bole. McKay was very sure the protuberance had not been there before. He had stared steadily at that tree more than once, and its shape was quite clear in his mind. Was that bump an insensate wood growth now revealed for the first time by the changing sun slant, or—