“Mist—of course, sir! But it do look like steam, and it makes me think of rations and hot coffee. I say, if one feels like this just at daybreak, how’s it going to be by night? Here goes to tighten my belt.”
Peter suited the action to his words, and moved the tongue of his buckle up two holes.
After this the lad sat peering through a dense, green curtain of the beautiful tropic leafage, till by degrees all the mist had floated away with the stream, leaving the water glittering and sparkling in the bright sunshine, and giving the watchers a clear view of the flowing river and the jungle that bowed its pendent branches so that they kissed the water, while farther on tall, rigid palms shot up and displayed their feathery tufts of great leaves, to sway gently in the hot sunshine.
“Let’s see, Mister Archie; don’t seem to be many paths where helephants and things come down to drink. I don’t believe if we were landed there we could get through those woods. I wonder what makes them call them jungles. I suppose it means because the trees are all junged up together so that you can’t get through. If they called it tangle there’d be some sense in it. But that ain’t the worst.”
“What is, then, Pete?” replied Archie, speaking so that his companion in misfortune should not think him surly and distant.
“Why, we have got to carry them four little chesties and the gun right through it in the dark. Well, we’ve got ’em, sir, and that’s what we come for.”
“Yes, Pete; and it will be a relief to get them to the Residency.”
“Yes, sir; and we have got to do it; and that means we shall, somehow.”
The lad ceased speaking, and bent down to shift the four square, solid-looking boxes a little, and as he did so he uttered a low grunt.
“I say, sir, it’s been so dark that we couldn’t tell what we were doing, but lookye here. These ’ere two bottom ones are standing right in the water. It’s to be hoped they are tin-lined, or else what about the cartridges? What do you say to laying them two bamboo poles right across the boat for the day, and standing the boxes on them?”