She looked pleased.
“Well,” she said, “I know the people and their ways. Not only that”—looking rather serious—“I hear and overhear things that you wouldn’t understand, or rather wouldn’t be able to get behind even if you had a fair amount of the language at your disposal, and you’re not making a bad progress under my poor tuition, Alaric.”
“Delighted. Only it isn’t ‘poor.’”
She made laughing rejoinder, and these two happy people talked on lightly, or half seriously by turns, rejoicing ill their newly-welded happiness. And the skull stared drearily up from the ground, sad relic of a fellow-creature done to death here in the forest gloom amid every circumstance of torment and blood.
“Hallo! what’s the matter with the gees?” said Denham suddenly. “They seem unhappy about something, and it can’t be only about this old skull.”
For the horses were showing great uneasiness, snorting and snuffing and striving to free themselves.
“They’ve seen or scented something,” pronounced Verna.
“Well, we’d better investigate,” said Denham, holding ready the small bore, yet hard-hitting, rifle he had brought with him in view of “specimens,” and advancing in the direction to which the horses’ fears pointed. “Keep back, Verna. It may be a snake or a leopard.”
Hardly were the words uttered than a serpentine head and neck of a dull yellow colour rose up out of the herbage, then subsided, with a half-startled hiss. Denham felt his sleeve plucked, as though to arrest his advance.
“Leave it, and come away,” Verna whispered. “It’s the indhlondhlo. They’re frightfully dangerous.”