“Because I know that part along there. We can’t see nobody, but I dessay there’s Injuns watching us all the time from among the leaves, and if we went closer they might have a shot at us.”
“Then they have guns?”
“No, sir, bows and arrows some of ’em, but mostly blowpipes.”
“With poisoned arrows?”
“That’s so, sir, and, what’s worse, they know how to use ’em. They hit a man I knew once with a tiny bit of an arrow thing, only a wood point as broke off in the wound—wound, it weren’t worth calling a wound, but the little top was poisoned, and before night he was a dead man.”
“From the poison?”
“That’s it, sir. He laughed at it at first. The bit of an arrow, like a thin skewer with a tuft of cotton wool on the end, didn’t look as if it could hurt a strong man as I picked it up and looked where the point had been nearly sawed off all round.”
“What, to make it break off?” cried Rob.
“That’s so, my lad. When they’re going to use an arrow they put the point between the teeth of a little fish’s jaw—sort o’ pirana thing like them here in the river. Then they give the arrow a twiddle round, and the sharp teeth nearly eat it through, and when it hits and sticks in a wound the point breaks off, and I wouldn’t give much for any one who ever got one of those bits of sharp wood in their skins.”
“What a pleasant look-out!” said Brazier. “Oh, it’s right enough, sir. The thing is to go up parts where there are no Indians, and that’s where I’m going to take you. I say, look at that open patch yonder, where there’s a bit o’ green between the river and the trees.”