"What is it, Bill?" Rhodes asked.
"We are being followed!"
He made no immediate response to that dire intelligence. We all stood listening, waiting; but a silence pervaded the forest as deep as though it had never, since the day of creation, been broken by the faintest pulsation of sound.
Then, after some moments, Rhodes asked:
"Are you sure, Bill, that we are being followed?"
"Yes! I tell you that I know that we are!"
"Well," said he, turning slowly, "I don't see that we can do anything about it, save keep a sharp lookout; and so on we go."
Whereupon he and the others started. I had turned to follow when that sound, low and mysterious as before, stopped me in my tracks. And in that very instant came another—a sharp interjection from Rhodes, instantaneously followed by a scream, the short, piercing scream of a woman.
I should have explained that we were in a dense growth of fern, a growth some ten or twelve feet in height; it was a meet place indeed for an ambuscade. Overhead, too, the branches met and intertangled, affording an excellent place for a snake-cat or some other arboreal monster to lie in wait and drop or spring upon any human or brute passing below.
Now, as I whirled to that exclamation and scream—the danger there behind forgotten in what was so imminent before—it was to find, to my indescribable fear and horror, that my companions, every single one of them, had vanished.