“But he may not be there,” cried Rob excitedly, as he looked round among the densely packed trees. “Let’s try and find some track by which he has gone.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to do, and couldn’t find one, sir. If he’s been wounded, somehow he’d nat’rally make back for the hut, so as to find us and get help. Come along.”
“Oh, Shaddy, we oughtn’t to have left him. We ought to have kept together.”
“No good to tell me that, Mr Rob, sir; I feel it now, but I did it all for the best. There, sir, it’s of no use to stay here no longer. Come on, and we may hit upon his backward trail.”
Rob gave another wild look round, and then joined Shaddy, who was carefully studying the position of the sun, where a gleam came through the dense foliage high above their heads, and lightened the deep green twilight.
“That’s about the course,” he muttered, as he gave the iguana a hitch over to his right shoulder. “Now then, Mr Rob, sir, let’s make a swift passage if we can, and hope for the best. Pah! Look at the flies already after the meat. No keeping anything long here.”
The remark struck Rob as being out of place at such a time, but he was fain to recall how he had made speeches quite as incongruous, so he followed his companion in silence, trusting to him implicitly, and wondering at the confidence with which he pressed on in one direction, with apparently nothing to guide him. In fact, all looked so strange and undisturbed that Rob at last could not contain himself.
“Mr Brazier cannot have been anywhere here, Shaddy,” he cried excitedly. “Two wild beasts must have been fighting.”
“For that there bit o’ string, sir?” said the man, drily. “What do you call that, then, and that?”
He pointed up to a bough about nine feet above him, where a cluster of orchids grew, for the most part of a sickly, pallid hue, save in one spot, where a shaft of sunlight came through the dense leafy canopy and dyed the strangely-formed petals of one bunch with orange, purple and gold, while the huge mossy tree trunk, half covered with parasitic creepers, whose stems knotted it with their huge cordage, showed traces of some one having climbed to reach the great horizontal bough.