It was an awful collapse. A yawning gulf had been driven into the earth, and the hut—originally a solid structure—having been hurled bodily skyward, shattered to atoms, and inextricably mixed in its parts, had come down again into the gulf as into a ready-made grave.
It would be vain to search for any sort of letter, sign, or communication from his friends among the débris. Tolly felt that at once, yet he could not think of leaving without a search. After one deep and prolonged sigh he threw off his lethargy, and began a close inspection of the surroundings.
“You see,” he muttered to himself, as he moved quickly yet stealthily about, “they’d never have gone off without leavin’ some scrap of information for me, to tell me which way they’d gone, even though they’d gone off in a lightnin’ hurry. But p’raps they didn’t. The reptiles may have comed on ’em unawares, an’ left ’em no time to do anything. Of course they can’t have killed ’em. Nobody ever could catch Paul Bevan asleep—no, not the sharpest redskin in the land. That’s quite out o’ the question.”
Though out of the question, however, the bare thought of such a catastrophe caused little Trevor’s under lip to tremble, a mist to obscure his vision, and a something-or-other to fill his throat, which he had to swallow with a gulp. Moreover, he went back to the ruined hut and began to pull about the wreck with a fluttering heart, lest he should come on some evidence that his friends had been murdered. Then he went to the highest part of the rock to rest a little, and consider what had best be done next.
While seated there, gazing on the scene of silent desolation, which the pale moonlight rendered more ghastly, the poor boy’s spirit failed him a little. He buried his face in his hands and burst into tears.
Soon this weakness, as he deemed it, passed away. He dried his eyes, roughly, and rose to resume his search, and it is more than probable that he would ere long have bethought him of the cave where Betty had left her note, if his attention had not been suddenly arrested by a faint glimmer of ruddy light in a distant part of the forest. The robbers were stirring up their fires, and sending a tell-tale glow into the sky.
“O-ho!” exclaimed Tolly Trevor.
He said nothing more, but there was a depth of meaning in the tone and look accompanying that “O-ho!” which baffles description.
Tightening his belt, he at once glided down the slope, flitted across the rivulet, skimmed over the open space, and melted into the forest after the most approved method of Red Indian tactics.
The expedition from which he had just returned having been peaceful, little Trevor carried no warlike weapons—for the long bowie-knife at his side, and the little hatchet stuck in his girdle, were, so to speak, merely domestic implements, without which he never moved abroad. But as war was not his object, the want of rifle and revolver mattered little. He soon reached the neighbourhood of the robbers’ fire, and, when close enough to render extreme caution necessary, threw himself flat on the ground and advanced à la “snake-in-the-grass.”