“And be shot!” said Abel, bitterly. “There, you’re down to the end of that row. I’ll go this way. He’s watching us.”
Bart obeyed. He was one who always did obey; and by degrees the young men were working right away from each other, till they were a good two hundred yards apart.
Abel was at the end of his row first, and he stopped and turned to begin again and go down, so as to pass Bart at about the middle of the clearing; but Bart had another minute’s chopping to do before turning.
He was close up to a dense patch of forest—one wild tangle of cane and creeper, which literally tied the tall trees together and made the forest impassable—when the shrieking of a kind of jay, which had been flitting about excitedly, stopped, and was followed by the melodious whistle of a white bird and the twittering of quite a flock of little fellows of a gorgeous scarlet-crimson. Then the shrieking of several parrots answering each other arose; while just above Bart’s head, where clusters of trumpet-shaped blossoms hung down from the edge of the forest, scores of brilliantly-scaled humming-birds literally buzzed on almost transparent wing, and then suspended themselves in mid-air as they probed the nectaries of the flowers with their long bills.
“You’re beauties, you are,” said Bart, stopping to wipe his brow; “but I’d give the hull lot on you for a sight of one good old sarcy sparrer a-sitting on the cottage roof and saying chisel chisel. Ah! shall us ever see old Devonshire again?”
The parrots hung upside-down, and the tiny humming-birds flitted here and there, displaying, from time to time, the brilliancy of their scale-like feathers, and Bart glanced at his fellow-convict and was about to work back, when there came a sound from out of the dark forest which made him stare wildly, and then the sound arose again.
Bart changed colour, and did not stop to hoe, but walked rapidly across to Abel.
“What’s the matter?” said the latter.
“Dunno, lad,” said the other, rubbing his brow with his arm; “but there’s something wrong.”
“What is it?”