Listening a little longer, he becomes convinced it was but the crickets he heard, and keeps on to the house.
Chapter Forty Nine.
Waiting the word.
To all appearance Fernand’s fireworks are about to bear fruit, this likely to be bitter. As the sky, darker after the lightning’s flash, a cloud is collecting over the new settlement, which threatens to sweep down upon it in a rain storm of ruin. What but they could have caused this cloud; or, at all events, given a cue for the time of its bursting.
It appears in the shape of a cohort of dusky horsemen, painted and plumed. No need to say, they are the same that were seen by Hawkins and Tucker.
Having crossed the river at its lower ford, where so far the hunters saw their tracks, there losing them, the savages continued on. Not by the main road leading to the mission, but along a path which deflects from it soon after leaving the river’s bank. A narrower trace, indeed the continuation of that they had been following all along—the transverse route across the bottom-land from bluff to bluff, on both sides ascending to the steppe.
But though they came down on one side, they went not up on the other. Instead, having reached the nether bluff, they turned sharp along its base, by another and still narrower trace, which they knew would take them up to the mission-building. A route tortuous, the path beset with many obstacles; hence their having spent several hours in passing from the ford to the mission-house, though the distance between is barely ten miles.
No doubt they have good reason for submitting to the irksome delay caused by the difficult track, as also for the cautious manner in which they have been coming along it. Otherwise, they would certainly have chosen the direct road running nearer the river’s bank.