“You are sure?” I said.
“No,” he answered, “not sure, but I shall hope. Now let’s get on again till dark, and then we’ll have a good rest in the safest place we can find.”
In the exertion and toil that followed I found some relief. My interest, too, was excited by seeing how much Mr Francis seemed to change hour by hour, and how well he knew the country which he led us through.
He found for us a capital resting-place in a rocky gorge, where, unless tracked step by step, there was no fear of our being surprised. Here there was water and fruit, and, short a distance as we had come, the darkness made it necessary that we should wait for day.
Then followed days and weeks of slow travel through a beautiful country, always south and west. We did not go many miles some days, for the burden we carried made our passage very slow. Sometimes, too, our black scouts came back to announce that we were travelling towards some black village, or that a hunting party was in our neighbourhood, and though these people might have been friendly, we took the advice of our black companions and avoided them, either by making a détour or by waiting in hiding till they had passed.
Water was plentiful, and Jimmy and Ti-hi never let us want for fruit, fish, or some animal for food. Now it would be a wild pig or a small deer, more often birds, for these literally swarmed in some of the lakes and marshes round which we made our way.
The country was so thinly inhabited that we could always light a fire in some shut-in part of the forest without fear, and so we got on, running risks at times, but on the whole meeting with but few adventures.
After getting over the exertion and a little return of fever from too early leaving his sick-bed of boughs, Mr Francis mended rapidly, his wound healing well and his mind daily growing clearer. Every now and then, when excited, he had relapses, and looked at us hopelessly, talking quickly in the savages’ tongue; but these grew less frequent, and there would be days during which he would be quite free. He grew so much better that at the end of a month he insisted upon taking his place at one of the bamboos, proving himself to be a tender nurse to our invalid in his turn.
And all this time my father seemed to alter but little. The doctor was indefatigable in his endeavours; but though he soon wrought a change in his patient’s bodily infirmities to such an extent, that at last my father could walk first a mile, then a couple, and then ease the bearers of half their toil, his mind seemed gone, and he went on in a strangely vacant way.
As time went on and our long journey continued he would walk slowly by my side, resting on my shoulder, and with his eyes always fixed upon the earth. If he was spoken to he did not seem to hear, and he never opened his lips save to utter a few words in the savage tongue.