Chapter Twenty Five.
The Woodland Foes.
They took the same path without much difficulty, Shaddy tracing it carefully step by step; and for a time Rob eagerly joined in the tracing, every now and then pointing out a place where they had broken a twig or displaced a bough; but after a time the gloom of the forest began to oppress him, and a strange sensation of shrinking from penetrating farther forced him to make a call upon himself and think of the words uttered before they recommenced their search.
For there was always the feeling upon him that at any moment danger might be lurking thus in their way, and that the next moment they might be face to face with death.
“But that’s all selfishness,” he forced himself to think. “We have to find Mr Brazier.”
This fresh loss to a certain extent obliterated the other trouble, and there were times when poor Giovanni was completely forgotten, though at others Rob found himself muttering,—
“Poor Joe! and now poor Mr Brazier! Whose turn will it be next? And those at home will never know of our fate.”
But it generally happened that at these most depressing times something happened to make a fresh call upon his energies. Now it would be a fault in the tracking, their way seeming to be quite obliterated. Now Shaddy would point out marks certainly not made by them; for flowers of the dull colourless kind, which flourished so sickly here in these shades, had been broken-off, as if they had been examined, and then been thrown aside: convincing proofs that Brazier had been botanising there, collecting, and casting away objects unworthy of his care.
At one spot, unnoticed on their return, quite a bunch of curious growths lay at the foot of a huge buttressed tree, where there were indications of some one having lain down for a time as if to rest. Farther on, at the side of a tree, also unnoticed before, a great liana had been torn away from a tree trunk, so that it looked as if it had been done by one who climbed; and Shaddy said, with a satisfied smile,—