Nini, bronze-haired, dainty nymph of a girl, who had yet the stamina of a man, looked at him with brave eyes. Then her hands tightened on her rifle, and she stepped forward.
“When will you have us start?” Ivana asked in a low voice.
“Now!” Kirby answered, and, taking up the rifle which lay beside him—the same with which Naida had fought—he looked at the other girls.
“There is not one of you,” he said slowly, “who would not go willingly on this quest. But the pursuit party must be small and mobile. And there is another duty. To all of you I leave the care of the castle and the plateau. Take the three rifles I shall leave behind, do what you can to reassure the old people, and hold the plateau safe until we return.”
A murmur of girls’ voices sounded in the temple. Kirby motioned to Nini and Ivana, and followed by a low cheer, they moved off together.
The night was on them, where they crouched in a cave above a swiftly flowing river. Kirby, rifle across his knees, sat peering out across the black, invisible stretches of the forest. His nostrils quivered to this mingled smells of fresh growth and fetid decay of the grotesque land. In his ears shrilled the creaking and scraping of insects, the flap of unseen wings, the distant bellowing grunt of some unseen, unknown animal.
“I cannot sleep,” Ivana said presently, from back in the cave.
“Hush,” he whispered, “you will wake Nini.”
“But I am already awake!” came her answer. “I—I cannot forget the white snakes which slid from that tree when you tried to cut firewood.”