“Poor boy,” he thought to himself. “He is handsome, too, very, in the Anglo-Saxon, blue-eyed style, manly-looking as well. I wonder why he has no show.”
As the evening wore on this subtle antagonism deepened, at any rate such was obvious to the object thereof. Yet Denham laid himself out to be friendly. He made no attempt to monopolise Verna’s society, but spent most of the time chatting and smoking with her father, leaving the other a clear field so far as he himself was concerned. And of this the other had laid himself out to make the most; as why should he not, since he had ridden a two days’ journey with that express object?
Once, when the conversation was general, and turning on the probability of a general rising, the subject of the state of native feeling in the Makanya district came up; Verna said, “Mr Denham came right through the Makanya bush all alone.”
But it happened that several people were talking at once, as is not unfrequently the case when a topic of public interest is under discussion, and the remark was lost. Verna did not repeat it. Some strange, unaccountable instinct kept her from doing so. It could be nothing else but instinct, for certainly Denham himself gave no sign of having so much as heard it. But the time was to come when she should look back on that instinct with very real meaning indeed.
Chapter Twelve.
Treachery.
The Lumisana forest covers many square miles of country, and that the roughest and most impenetrable country imaginable. Huge tree-trunks, dense undergrowth, impenetrable thickets of haak doorn, that awful fishhook-like thorn which, like the sword of the Edenic angel, turns every way, and growing in such close abattis that any one trying to force his way through it would in a second find not only his clothes but his skin torn to ribbons and could not get through even then. Where the ground was comparatively level a way might be made by the following of game paths; but there were broken, tumbled masses of rocks and cliffs, and dark ravines falling away suddenly, with lateral clefts running up from these for long distances, the said clefts so overhung by dense foliage as to form actual caves into which the light of day could hardly straggle. A terrible, an appalling place to get lost in, save for those with a lifetime of veldt-craft at their back, and the means of procuring wild food. To a new and inexperienced wanderer such a position would be well-nigh hopeless. Snakes of the most deadly varieties were abundant, the hyena and the leopard prowled at night—the latter abnormally bold and fierce, and giant baboons barked raucously from the rocks. Even in full, broad daylight, with the sun glancing down through the network of the tree-tops, there was an awesome stillness and an oppressiveness in the air, breathing of fever; at night the dense solitude and mysterious voices and rustlings were calculated to get upon the nerves.
To the natives the place was very much tagati. It exuded witchcraft and uncanniness. Even in the daytime they did not care to penetrate very far into its mysterious depths, and then only in twos or more. At night they were unanimous in leaving it severely alone.