With this trophy borne upon Ben’s shoulders, while I carried the “Queen Anne,” we wended our way toward the Pandora.
Chapter Twenty Five.
It was the intention of Ben and myself to return direct to the barque. We were quite satisfied with our day’s hunting, and wanted no more game.
We set out therefore in a direction, that as we thought would bring us back to the river.
We had not gone far, however, when we began to fancy that we were going in the wrong course, and then we turned aside from it and took another.
This new one we followed for more than a mile, but, as no river appeared, we believed we were now certainly going the wrong way, and once more turned back.
After walking another mile or two, without coming to the river, we began to think we were lost. At all events we had certainly lost our way, and had not the slightest idea on what side of us lay the river, or the barque, or the barracoon of King Dingo Bingo.
After resting a bit—for we had got quite tired, fagging backward and forward through the woods—we took a fresh start, and this time walked on for three miles or more in a straight course. It was all guess-work, however, and a bad guess it turned out to be; for, instead of getting into the low bottom lands that lay along the banks of the river, we found ourselves coming out into a hilly country, which was open and thinly timbered. We saw plenty of game on all sides—antelopes of several kinds—but we were now so anxious about our way, that we never thought of stopping to have a shot at them. At that moment we would rather have seen the royal-mast of the Pandora than the largest herd of antelopes in the world.