This terrible silence lasted quite five minutes. It seemed to me like an hour, and all the while we knew that at least a dozen armed savage warriors were within charging distance, and that discovery meant certain captivity, if not death.
I held my breath till I felt that when I breathed again I should utter a loud gasp and be discovered. I dared not move to bury my face in my hands or in the soft earth, and my sensations were becoming agonising, when there was a sharp tap on a tree, so near that I felt the ground quiver. The tap was repeated to right and left, accompanied by a curious cry that sounded like “Whai—why!” and the party swept on.
“A narrow escape!” said the doctor, as we breathed freely once more. “Go on, Gyp. Let’s get to earth; we shall be safer there.”
I did not understand the doctor’s words then, but followed in silence, with Jack Penny coming close up to me whenever he found the way open, to tell me of his own affairs.
“My back’s a deal better,” he whispered. “I’ve been able to rest it lately—waiting for you, and it makes it stronger, you know, and—”
“Silence, Penny!” said the doctor reprovingly, and Jack fell back a few feet; and we travelled on, till suddenly, instead of treading upon the soft decayed-leaf soil of the forest, I found that we were rustling among bushes down a steep slope. Then we were amongst loose stones, and as the darkness was not quite so dense I made out by sight as well as by the soft trickling sound, that a little rivulet was close to our feet.
This we soon afterwards crossed, and bidding me stoop the doctor led the way beneath the dense bushes for some little distance before we seemed to climb a stony bank, and then in the intense darkness he took me by the shoulders and backed me a few steps.
“There’s quite a bed of branches there,” he said aloud. “You can speak out, we are safe here;” and pressing me down I sat upon the soft twigs that had been gathered together, and Jack Penny came and lay down beside me, to talk for a time and then drop off to sleep, an example I must have followed. For all at once I started and found that it was broad daylight, with the loud twittering song of birds coming from the bushes at the entrance of what seemed to be a low-roofed extensive cave, whose mouth was in the shelving bank of a great bluff which overhung a silvery-sounding musical stream.
Some light came in from the opening; but the place was made bright by the warm glow that came from a kind of rift right at the far end of the cave, and through this was also wafted down the sweet forest scents.
“Jimmy’s was a lucky find for us,” said the doctor, when I had partaken of the food I found they had stored there, and we had talked over our position and the probability of my belief being correct. “It is shelter as well as a stronghold;” and he pointed to the means he had taken to strengthen the entrance, by making our black followers bind together the branches of the tangled shrubs that grew about the mouth.