The monkey pointed in front of them in the very direction Bomba was taking.
The boy hushed the monkey’s chattering and stood silent as a statue, listening.
From his long experience in the jungle he had become preternaturally sharp of hearing. He knew all the sounds of the jungle and could interpret them accurately.
But strain his ears as he might, he could detect nothing out of the ordinary. There was the usual hum of insects, the occasional howl of a monkey or shriek of a parrot. But there was nothing to indicate that, besides himself, there was any human being in that part of the jungle.
He glanced at Doto with a look of inquiry, as though to ask if the animal might not be mistaken. But Doto held to his arm with such a frenzied clutch that Bomba decided to trust in the creature’s instinct or knowledge—or both.
There was no help for it. In spite of his eagerness to reach Casson, about whose condition he was in a ferment of anxiety, he must make a long circuit to avoid the region in which Doto had indicated that danger lay.
So he changed his course, left the faint trail that he had been following, and swung out in a sweeping semicircle, with every nerve at tension and every sense on the alert. With him went his friend, Doto.
On the route he was now pursuing there was no trail, and Bomba had to hack a way through the underbrush. This involved exhausting work and made his progress slow. But most of all he dreaded it for fear that the noise he necessarily made should attract the attention of lurking foes.
At times, when the brush was very thick, Doto would climb to the lowest branch of a tree and swing from one bough to the other of the interlacing trees, and Bomba, who was almost as agile as the monkey himself, followed his companion’s example.
Soon, however, the jungle thinned a little, and they traversed the forest with redoubled speed in order to make up for lost time.