“But we can’t all go and leave the boat alone.”
“Why, the boat won’t run away!”
“Someone might run away with it, though.”
“Tell you,” Jule suggested, “we’ll leave the prow light burning, so we can see if anyone goes near it, and then we won’t go out of sight of the light. How will that answer?”
“Fine!” Alex panted, trying to pull Captain Joe back into the cabin. His highness, the dog, did not relish the notion of being locked up in the hot little coop while the boys had a run on shore, so he drew back with all his strength.
Alex won at last, however, and the door was closed on the indignant bulldog. To speak the truth, Clay was rather glad that the boys had chosen to accompany him to the shore, for it was dark and uncanny in the forest. There was an indication of rain, though it was in the midst of the dry season, and a strange odor which they could not account for came to the nostrils of the lads.
“A Brazilian forest,” Jule said, as they left the row-boat tied up in a thicket and faced the jungle, “is about the most mysterious place on the round earth. Down here where we are, in the basement, it is always twilight, even at noon of a sunny day. We see only the stems of plants and creepers and the boles of the trees. The beauty, the blossoms, the colors, the magnificence, is all at the top. Someone said that the only place from which to view a South American forest in all its glory is from the top of a mountain, or from an aeroplane.”
“There isn’t much magnificence down here,” Alex answered. “Here, Jule, what you got in your clothes that smells like matches, and what you sneaking off there alone for?”
“Never you mind!” Jule replied. “You just stick to your guesses and let me alone. I’m going to give those boys the scare of their lives. I’ll teach them to go off and stay like this!”
“You stay here!” commanded Clay, but the mischievous boy was already gone. They heard him pushing through the underbrush for a time, saw the round eye of his flashlight as it swept aloft, and then the jungle was once more still—save for the natural life within it—and dark.