As quick as a lizard he glided into the shade beneath the walls of the hut. There he lay for some minutes, listening, with all his senses alert.
This man had much in common with the wild beasts of the forests. He was quick to hear, quick to see; it seemed as if he even had the power to scent danger, as the reed-buck or the buffalo.
His ears caught nothing but the varied sounds of wild, nocturnal life in the jungle. The stockade was not more than a hundred paces distant from the skirting of the forest. Somewhere near at hand a leopard growled, and a troop of monkeys, frightened out of their wits, could be heard scrambling through the branches of the trees. Farther away, a pair of lions were hunting; there is no sound more terrible and haunting than the quick, panting noise that is given by this great beast of prey as it follows upon the track of an antelope or deer. Then, far in the distance, there was a noise, so faint as to be hardly audible, like the beating of a drum. Crouch knew what it was. Indeed, in these matters there was little of which he was ignorant. It was a great gorilla, beating its stomach in passion in the darkness. And that is a sound before which every animal that lives in the jungle quails and creeps away into hiding; even the great pythons slide back into the depths of silent, woodland pools.
But it was not to the forest that Crouch's ear was turned. He was listening for a movement in the hut in which slept the Portuguese trader, who went by the name of Cæsar. After a while, seeming satisfied, he crawled on, in absolute silence, in the half-darkness, looking for all the world like some cruel four-footed beast that had come slinking from out of the jungle.
He reached the door of the hut, and crept stealthily in. Inside, he was not able to see. It was some little time before his eye grew accustomed to the darkness.
Then he was just able to discern the long figure of the Portuguese stretched upon his couch. Half-raising himself, he listened, with his ear not two inches from the man's mouth. Cæsar was breathing heavily. He was evidently fast asleep.
Still on hands and knees, as silently as ever, Crouch glided out of the hut.
Instead of returning by the way he had come, he turned in the opposite direction, and approached another hut. It was that which belonged to the half-caste, de Costa, whom he had met five years before in St. Paul de Loanda.
Once again he passed in at the door, silently, swiftly, with his knife still in his teeth.
This hut was even darker than the other, by reason of the fact that the door was smaller. Crouch sat up, and rubbed his eyes, and inwardly abused the universe in general because he was not able to see.