Sampson muttered something and retreated. Garth slipped the pack on Brown's shoulders. The Captain, looking blankly ahead, didn't seem to notice.
"Keep your eye on him," Garth told Paula. "He'll be between us. He'll keep marching till we tell him to stop. See?"
She nodded, moistening her lips. "Y-yes. Is—that—going to happen to all of us?"
Garth said nothing. There wasn't anything to say.
But he knew, as he led the party away from the camp, how long a gamble he was undertaking. There were so many chances that he might fail! The odds were plenty tough—yet the stakes were equally high.
Had he known how difficult those odds were, Garth might not have risked it. For the Noctoli poison worked faster than he had guessed.
Meantime he guided ten sullen, fearful men, a walking corpse, and a girl deeper into the unexplored heart of the Black Forest. The Noctoli flowers breathed their poison from the underbrush, deadly and relentlessly.
VI
That day they met a new enemy: jet-black lizards, five feet long, that clung to the black tree-boles, perfectly camouflaged, till the party came close. Then the reptiles flashed toward them, fanged jaws gaping. Constant alertness was all that saved them—that, and the blazing guns that killed the monsters.