“I know,” replied Gerard. “What’s all this row about? Single file. We shall have to be doubly careful.” And on they went, with that occasional breaking of twigs around them that was infinitely worse than the silence had been. It would now prove impossible immediately to distinguish an approaching assassin. The darkness seemed to thicken, as with a flood of ink.
At last they once more stood outside the jungle. Before them, with an open space intervening, lay the camp, black against the darkness of the plain. All around stretched the rapid ruin of a roughly widened clearing; the smell of roots and rotting plants and freshly-hewn logs was almost insupportable. It would have signalled the camp from afar. Every one who has slept in these clearings knows the odor. From time to time a rocket went up in silence, piloting the patrols.
“Halt!” said Gerard. “What’s wrong behind?”
“Rear man missing, sir.”
He turned sharply. “Impossible!” No one ventured to contradict him, but their silence did not alter the fact that Popa had dropped away.
“We must go back,” said Gerard. “He must have fallen. How did you not notice?”
“Please, Lieutenant, it was the crackling. I thought it was the Kalongs.”
They retraced their steps in glum anxiety, and searched back into the forest for nearly half a mile. At last Gerard dared go no farther; already his military conscience pricked him. The military conscience almost always pricks.
“I must take on the despatches,” he said. “After that we can see. I don’t understand at all. He can’t have fallen. You, Drok, surely we have gone far enough?”