Even then some little time elapsed before Mirandola yielded to Dennis's persuasive calls and slid, still somewhat nervously, to the ground. He avoided the reptile's body, and scampered away with shrill cries to the open. When Dennis overtook him, the monkey sprang upon his shoulder, and so they returned to the hut.
After this thrilling experience Dennis felt somewhat less at ease in his peregrinations of the island. He had come to think that he had nothing to fear there so long as it was unvisited by men. But the thickets that gave hiding to one huge reptile might harbour many more. Henceforth he walked more warily, and never ventured far from his hut without a gun.
CHAPTER VI
The Spanish Whip
Dennis had given up the idea of building a boat as a means of escape from the island; but now that time again hung heavy on his hands, he reverted to it as a refuge from the tedium of idleness. It promised to give him much labour, for, unless he stripped the planking from the Maid Marian, he must needs fell trees for himself, and prepare his timbers as well as his unskill could devise. The trees of the island were for the most part unknown to him; and he was not aware of the Indian practice of hollowing out a cedar trunk with fire or hatchet. In his wanderings he now began to take note of the different species, with a view to selecting one that would best suit his tools.
One day, when he was strolling through the woodland on this errand, he was amazed, and not a little alarmed, to hear, from some spot far to his right, what seemed to him to be the ring of axes. He halted, incredulous. The island, he was assured, had no other inhabitant; yet he could not be mistaken; the sound of tree-felling reminded him of home, and he felt a sudden deep yearning for the combes and holts of far-off Devon. But this feeling was immediately quelled by a sense of danger. Who were these woodcutters? No friends, he was sure; he had given up hope of finding friends upon these remote coasts. And if not friends, discovery by these spelt death to him, or slavery to which death would be preferable.
He was minded to turn about and seek safety in his hut. Built upon the edge of the chine, it could only be discovered by careful exploration of the woodland, and the chine was all but invisible from the sea. There he might remain in hiding, with a fair chance that he would not be found. But this first impulse passed. He felt an overmastering curiosity to see who these visitors were. Whence had they come, he wondered? Why, if they came from the distant mainland, had they crossed the sea? He could not suppose that wood was lacking upon the shores of the great continent.
Slowly, with infinite caution, he began to thread his way towards the sound. There were open spaces amid the woodland; these he durst not cross, but kept always in the shelter of the trees. He dreaded lest Mirandola should betray him by a cry; but the monkey leapt from bough to bough almost noiselessly, as if he too had taken alarm from the unwonted sound. A few weeks before, Dennis himself would have found it difficult to make his way through the woods and the undergrowth without giving signs of his presence by the snapping of twigs or the rustle of parting foliage; but the abiding sense of danger which had oppressed him during his earlier passages across the island had bred in him a wariness of movement that was now almost as instinctive as in the wild creatures whose lives depended on their caution.
Guiding himself by the sounds, he was drawn towards a grove of trees that lay about two hundred yards from the southern beach. Only a day or two before he had struck his hatchet into one of them, and concluded from its soft white sappy rind that it would not provide fit timber for his boat. Yet it was clearly these trees upon which the unseen woodmen were at work. He stole forward, and coming to a dense fringe of undergrowth beyond which the grove lay, he edged his way into the thicket, and very stealthily pressed the foliage aside until he got a view of what was doing.