“He begins to feel now,” Dick was telling himself, “that he has really mastered that old weakness of his about taking things, whether he needed them or not. It was a terrible thing to have grip him, and I’m mighty glad he’s won out. Besides, he needs all the outdoor exercise he can get, so as to throw off that tendency to tuberculosis that runs in his family.”
Thus Dick was thinking of others as he deftly stripped the small twigs of their rich stores. Suddenly he stopped work and stared at the ground.
“Whee! there’s another of those queer footprints again,” he muttered. “Seems that the monkey likes blueberries as well as any human can, or the partridges even. He’s been browsing around here all right, for I can see where something has cleaned off a heap of branches.”
The thought that even then the gorilla, or whatever it was, might not be far away gave Dick a thrill. He was a brave boy, however, as he had proved on numerous occasions in the past; and this was made manifest when he almost unconsciously started to follow the spoor of the animal.
A short distance away he came to a well defined trail. It looked as though the gorilla must have passed along back and forth scores of times.
Dick stood still and stared.
“Here’s a find,” he muttered to himself. “Chances are ten to one that this leads to his den, all right. A nervy hunter might follow it up and come on the big beast in his own quarters; but I reckon it would be silly for me to think of doing such a thing as that.”
The temptation to follow just a little way, to see where the trail led, caused Dick to start hesitatingly forward. A gorilla in his native Borneo haunt is considered one of the most terrible creatures known to big game hunters the world over, not even excepting the grizzly bear of our own country, and Dick’s pulses were bounding, and his nerves were on edge, for he realized that at any minute he might find himself face to face with the animal.
And, indeed, that was just what did happen, for Dick suddenly heard a horrible gurgling sound close by, and turning his head found himself staring at a squatty, hairy figure that looked like a misshapen man with amazingly broad shoulders, and long dangling arms.