“Is it near here?” asked Duncan.
“It is far to the right,” she answered, after some thought. “We should not have come in this direction at all.”
Blaming ourselves for our stupidity in not questioning the girl about this land-mark before, we turned the machine again and began to double on our tracks.
“This means spending another night in the wilderness,” said Moit; but he spoke with unusual cheerfulness, and I reflected that as long as Ilalah was by his side our inventor was not likely to complain of the length of this trip.
“But there seem to be no Indians in this neighborhood to annoy us,” I observed. “Do you know, Duncan, I believe that your invention of the glycerine explosive is almost as important as the machine itself?”
“Oh, it has helped us nicely in two emergencies, so far,” he answered soberly; “but I hope we shall not be called upon to use it again. It is so powerful that it frightens me. Every time I handle it I place all of us in as much danger as I do our enemies, for a premature explosion is not unlikely to happen. Especially is this true in so hot a climate as the one we are now travelling in. The can that contains the glyceroid was quite warm when I filled that bottle to-day, and this condition adds to its tendency to explode.”
It made me a little uneasy to hear this.
“Doesn’t it require a jar to set it off?” I asked.
“Almost always. And there is less chance of a jar to the can if we leave it alone.”
We finally reached the place where we had first arrived at the forest, and fording the stream, which was shallow as it came from the wood, continued our search to the westward. The country was very beautiful around here, and when I asked Ilalah why it was not more thickly settled she said that the forest was full of terrible beasts and serpents, which attacked men fearlessly and destroyed them. So few cared to live in the neighborhood.