Although there was a moon, and the sky showed great constellations with which the boys were unfamiliar, the jungle was dark and creepy. Keeping the lights from the workings on their left, the boys pushed their way through the undergrowth for some distance without resting, and then paused in a little glade and listened.
“Gee,” cried Jimmie, after standing at attention for a moment, “there’s some one following us. We’d better dig in a little deeper.”
“It may be a wild animal,” said Peter, who, while ready to face whatsoever peril might come in the company of the man they were running away from, was in mortal terror of the jungle.
“There are no man-eaters here,” Jimmie replied, unwinding a snake-like creeper from his neck and pushing on.
“I can feel snakes crawling up my legs now,” complained Peter, with a shiver.
The noise in the rear came on about as fast as they could move, and at last Jimmie sat down on a fallen tree.
“He can hear us,” he said. “We might as well be hiding with a brass band.”
“Then we’ll keep quiet until he passes,” Peter trembled out. “I’m afraid to go plunging through here in the dark, anyway.”
Making as little noise as possible, the boys crept into a particularly dense thicket and crouched down. Almost as soon as they were at rest the noise behind ceased. In five minutes it began again, but the sounds grew fainter and fainter and finally died out.
“He was followin’ us all right,” Jimmie said. “Now we’ll dig in a little deeper, so as not to come out anywhere near him, and then go back to camp.”