O'Hara raised his hand and called to him to come back; but, never turning his head, he disappeared like a frightened animal.
Again we were alone in the wilderness.
To me, now, all that formerly I had understood only in vague outline had become clear in every detail. I knew, of course, that, after their own ship was wrecked, our quartette of adventurers had sent Gleazen back to America, to get by hook or crook another vessel to serve their godless purposes; and I knew that they had implicated my deluded uncle in something more than ordinary slave trade. Their talk of the man who had stayed behind for a purpose still further convinced me that Arnold had been right; I remembered the rough stones on the table in the cabin the night when I took the four by surprise. But it was only common sense that, if our first guess were all their secret, they would have smuggled such a find down to the coast, and have taken their chance in embarking in the first vessel that came to port. There was more than that of which to be mindful, and I knew well enough what.
"I say, now, push forward this very minute," cried O'Hara. "Better travel a bad road by dark in safety than a good road by day that will land every mother's son of us in the place where there's no road back."
"The black devils are hard upon us," Gleazen cried. "Lay low, I say. Come afternoon we'll sneak along easy like."
"I stand with Bud O'Hara," said Matterson, slowly. "It'll not be so easy to hit us by moonlight as by sunlight."
"And once we're with Bull in the little fort that he'll have made for us," Bud persisted, "we'll be safe surely."
"It is harder to travel by night," said Arnold. "But it is easier by night than by day to evade an enemy."
The others looked at him curiously, as if surprised by his temerity in speaking out; but, oddly, his seemed to be the deciding voice. Working with furious haste, we sorted our goods and made them up into six packs, which we shouldered according to our strength. But as we worked, we would stop and look furtively around; and at the slightest sound we would start and stare. Our determination to go through to the end of our adventure had not flagged when at last we gathered beside the thicket where we had concealed the boat; but we were seven silent men who left the boat, the creek, and the river behind us, and with O'Hara to guide us set off straight into the heart of Africa.
O'Hara's long sojourn on the continent, which had made him a "black man" in the sense that he had come to believe, or at least more than half believe, in the silly superstitions of the natives, had served him better by giving him an amazing knowledge of the country. That he was following a trail he had traveled many times before would have been evident to a less keenly interested observer than I. But though he had traveled it ever so many times, it was a mystery to me how he could follow it unerringly, by moonlight alone, through black tangles of forest growth so dense that scarcely a ray stole down on the deeply shadowed path.