“I’m afraid, Harry,” he said, “that even if we did catch one we could do nothing like you propose with it. A peculiarity of the quesal is that it will not live in captivity. Not even an hour it is said. The human touch kills them immediately.”
The boys steadily pushed forward, although as the sun climbed higher the heat of the dense tropical forest that covered the mountain-side at the point they had now reached became most oppressive. Suddenly there was a loud grunting sound from a few feet ahead and a herd of small brown animals dashed away. Not before Harry, however, had got his rifle to his shoulder and brought one of them down with a skilful shot.
“A wild pig,” he announced triumphantly, turning over the animal he had brought down with his foot. Compared to a domestic porker the wild swine didn’t look much bigger than rabbits, but the boys hailed the one Harry had shot as a welcome addition to their larder.
“If we only had some apple sauce,” sighed the epicurean Harry.
“Why don’t you wish for mustard?” laughed Frank.
Harry’s pig weighed about thirty-five pounds, and so he carried it without much effort over his shoulder till they reached a clear space on the mountain-side, where they could cache it and easily find it on their way down.
“Now, if only no ocelots or jaguars come around we’ll have roast pork for supper to-night,” he remarked as he laid down his burden.
“I’ll show you how to fix that,” said Frank. With a few blows of his axe he lopped off some low branches from a near-by tree, and placed them in a circle round the carcass.
“That’s a dodge, Blakely told me about,” he announced when he had finished. “Any animal thief that happens along wouldn’t touch that pig now for the world. They see the branches and figure out that it is some kind of a trap.”
From time to time as the boys mounted higher, they stopped and carefully turned their glasses on the valley below. Somewhere in its apparently uninhabited sweep they knew that Rogero and his army and Estrada’s troops were maneuvering, but nothing that they could see gave them any inkling as to the exact whereabouts of the troops.