“Don’t let him cut into any such foolishness, Greenoak,” he went on. “Keep your eye on him, Greenoak. Keep your eye on him.”
And Greenoak promised he would. Then he went to bed, and, contrary to his usual custom, did not go to sleep immediately, but lay awake thinking. And at the same time precisely the same thing was holding good of Dick Selmes.
Now, in the course of the next two or three days, while the latter seldom missed an opportunity of plying his host with questions regarding Slaang Kloof, Harley Greenoak never opened his mouth on the subject. He seemed to treat it as a mere incident: a strange incident, it was true, but still an incident, and he had come across too many such in the course of a life adventurous beyond most lives to deem one incident, more or less, worth making any fuss about. He seemed, in short, to have dismissed it from his mind.
Consequently, it is strange that a day or two later, Harley Greenoak might have been seen—were there say one to see him—standing before the entrance of Slaang Kloof alone.
His strong, bearded, sun-tanned face was set and thoughtful; his gnarled hands were closed round the barrels of a double gun, whose stock was grounded; and, slung round him, was a sort of bundle that bulged. The rifle barrel held a Martini cartridge, the smooth-bore a heavy charge of Treble A buckshot.
He stood gazing into the place of fear, as though reading every tree and bush in its sombre forest depths.
As a matter of fact, he was there to solve its secret. Old Hesketh, to whom his reputation was known as a clearer-up of many a dark and blood-fraught mystery of the veldt, and who was an old friend of his into the bargain, had sent for him with that express object, and, as it was an entirely out-of-the-way and new part of the country to show his charge, he had heartily welcomed the idea. But he had no notion whatever of counting his said charge into the adventure with him.
He looked at the two jutting rock spurs as though calculating the distance of one from the other. Then he walked steadily forward until well within the portals of the sinister and fatal valley.
Superficially it differed in no way from any round dozen of the wild bushy kloofs on any other part of the farm. There was the same vegetation, mimosa and other varieties of acacia, spongy spekboem, and spidery Kafir bean—the geranium and plumbago throwing out a confusion of scarlet and light mauve—here a row of euphorbia, there a patch of yellow-woods, from whose limbs depended a tangle of long, straight monkey-ropes. Here all was dim and cool and delightful, the sunshine completely shut off or but faintly networked in patches on the ground and tree trunks. But it was here that every instinctive faculty of grasp and perception implanted in the up-country man became keenly alert and awake. For, by a course of intuitive calculations, he had located this spot as the one where the fell and fatal terror had overtaken its victims.
The nerve and courage of Harley Greenoak were entirely beyond question, but that did not dull his imagination or render him dead to the fact that in this cool and peaceful forest retreat he walked in very great peril indeed, that if he would escape this hidden death which had overtaken others, awful in its mysterious suddenness, he would have to muster every faculty of quick observation, lightning-like decision of action, and untiring alertness which he possessed.