"Have you heard any firing?" asked Michel Ardan.
"No."
"Not one shot?"
"Not one. That sportsman does not seem to bag much game!"
"What shall we do?" said Maston.
"Enter the wood at the risk of catching a bullet not meant for us."
"Ah!" exclaimed Maston, with an unmistakable accent, "I would rather have ten bullets in my head than one in Barbicane's head."
"Go ahead, then!" said Ardan, pressing his companion's hand.
A few seconds after the two companions disappeared in a copse. It was a dense thicket made of huge cypresses, sycamores, tulip-trees, olives, tamarinds, oaks, and magnolias. The different trees intermingled their branches in inextricable confusion, and quite hid the view. Michel Ardan and Maston walked on side by side phasing silently through the tall grass, making a road for themselves through the vigorous creepers, looking in all the bushes or branches lost in the sombre shade of the foliage, and expecting to hear a shot at every step. As to the traces that Barbicane must have left of his passage through the wood, it was impossible for them to see them, and they marched blindly on in the hardly-formed paths in which an Indian would have followed his adversary step by step.
After a vain search of about an hour's length the two companions stopped. Their anxiety was redoubled.