The Dangers of the Night.
It is not pleasant to hear a noise as of something forcing its way through bushes close by your bedside, when instead of the strong walls of a house in a thickly inhabited place, with police to protect you, there is nothing but a thin piece of canvas between you and a forest swarming, for aught you can tell, with hosts of dangerous creatures seeking their prey.
I felt that in my first night where I lay by the outskirts of one of the Central American forests, and I should have seized Uncle Dick by the arm and shaken him into wakefulness but for the dread of being considered cowardly.
For he seemed so calm and confident that I dared not wake him up, to be told that the noise I heard was only made by some innocent animal that would flee for its life if I slipped outside.
“I wonder whether that would,” I said to myself. “I’ll try.”
I made up my mind that I would take my double gun from where it lay beside me and go out; but it was a long time before I could make up my body to act; and when at last, in anger with myself for being so cowardly, I did creep out softly and make a dash in the direction of the sound, I was bathed in perspiration, and my legs shook beneath me, for I felt certain that the next minute I should be seized by some monstrous creature ready to spring at me out of the darkness.
But nothing did seize me. For there was a thud and a faint crash repeated again and again, and though I could not see, I felt certain that the fire had attracted some deer-like creature, which had gone bounding off, till all was silent again, when I crept back, letting the canvas fall behind me, feeling horribly conceited, and thinking what a brave fellow I must be.
I must have gone off to sleep directly I lay down then, for one moment I was looking at the dull-reddish patch in the canvas behind which the fire was burning, and the next everything was blank, till all at once I was wide awake, with a hand laid across my mouth, and the interior of our scrap of a tent so dark that I could see nothing; but I could hear someone breathing, and directly after Uncle Dick whispered:
“Lie still—don’t speak.”
He removed his hand then, and seemed to be listening.