In compliance with these words, they made desperate efforts to hurry their pace, and were beginning to pluck up hope. Suddenly their hearts stood still, and then began to beat furiously.
Far behind them in the mysterious, deadly jungle, they heard a weird, eerie shrill cry.
“What was it? What was it?” whispered Tom, in a low, horror-struck voice.
The man whom they had freed made one or two efforts to speak, but his words refused to come at first. Then he said, in a dry, hard voice, “I know what it is. That was the cry their hunting wolves give when they are on the trail of their quarry. May heaven help us now, for we are dead men.”
“Hunting wolves?” said Bert, in a strained voice, “what do you mean?”
“They’re three big wolves the savages captured at some time, and they have trained them to help run down game in the hunt, the same as we have trained dogs. Only these brutes are far worse than any dog, and a thousand times more savage. If they get us—” but here his voice trailed down into silence, for again they heard that fierce cry, but this time much nearer.
The little party broke into a desperate run, and blundered blindly, frantically forward. The mysterious, danger-breathing jungle surrounding them on every side, the horrible pursuit closing in on them from behind, caused their hair to rise with an awful terror that lent wings to their feet. They stumbled, fell, picked themselves and each other up again, and hastened madly forward in their wild race.
“If we can only make it, if we can only make it,” Bert repeated over and over to himself, while the breath came in great sobbing gasps from between his lips. He was thinking of their one last chance of safety—the little knoll that he had marked as they followed the savages’ trail the previous day as a possible retreat if they were pursued.
Loud and weird came the baying of the beasts on their trail, but Bert, straining his eyes ahead, could make out a little patch of moonlight through the trees.