This quick return drove home forcibly that near-tragedy of our four days’ wandering in a desert which, after all, was comparatively small in extent.
Once enabled to shield ourselves beneath the trees from the sun’s powerful rays, Hardy appeared willing to permit us to loaf a bit, and so it was that we whites had an opportunity to take stock of ourselves. Poor Van Dusee was thin to the point of emaciation, and I verily believe the man was wasting away as much from disappointment as from hardship. Anderson, brilliant-eyed and lean, was the same enthusiast, while the imperturbable Hardy seemed not to have altered a whit: he was the identical, brick-red, level-eyed, well-fleshed individual that we had first encountered in a cafe in Rio de Janiero in January. As for myself, I must have looked bad, as my arm had given me constant pain.
By this time we felt that de Silva deemed our party to have been buried alive in the Caverns of the Ataruipe, for he had not taken the slightest pains to conceal his trail. Thus it was that the tables, in fact, had turned. We were now pursuing de Silva!
No one of us voiced that thought, but that it was in the minds of each there could be no doubt. Personally, I know that I did not care to analyse my own attitude toward the cowardly Spaniard. I did not dare to! But what remained unnecessary to phrase in words was that if de Silva did escape with his booty to Rio de Janiero, no one of our party would have any opportunity to visit again the wonderland of the Ataruipe. And this, especially to Hardy (for entirely mundane reasons) and to Van Dusee (for the purely esthetic) was unthinkable.
We pushed on, encountering fresh signs of the expedition ahead of us which evidently, owing to the heavy treasure its members carried, was making slower progress than we were. Very shortly we came through our hard-won channel in the bamboos, and from then on we kept sharp lookout for de Silva.
On our third morning in that interminable brushwood tract, while Anderson was building a breakfast fire for which Zangaree and the Indians were collecting dry wood, Van Dusee, who had strolled on a bit, called back to us quietly:
“In that bush over there to the right,” he said, “is a white man. He is spying on us.”
It was only a moment before Anderson and Hardy, guns in hand, were on their way. I shouted a warning and followed more slowly. Suddenly Hardy lowered his rifle, and when I came up both he and young Anderson were silently regarding a bit of thick brushwood.
And well might they stare, for there, leering out at us, through the foliage, was the face of de Silva. It was livid and ghastly, and a number of vicious-looking red ants were moving jerkily around the face.