“I have a hunch we would have run into some of those spies if we had kept on,” I rejoined. “They must have headed us off and found that we didn’t pass on down this canyon, else they wouldn’t be searching here so thoroughly.”
“Right!” my friend agreed. “And now they’ve got us in a tight place!”
“Suppose,” I suggested, “we slip across the valley and climb part way up that other mountainside—then try to work along through the timber up there until we’re near the ship?”
“Good!” he assented. “Come on!”
Lying at full length upon the ground and wriggling along like snakes, we headed between two groups of the searchers. It was slow work, but we did not dare even to rise to our knees to crawl. Twice we dimly made out, not fifty feet away, some of the Chinamen slinking along, apparently hunting over every foot of the region. We could not tell how many of them there were now.
After a time that seemed nearly endless we reached the edge of the flat. Here we rose to our feet to tackle the slope in front of us.
As we did so, two figures leaped out of the gloom close at hand and split the night with cries of “Fan kuei! Fan kuei!” (“Foreign devils!”)
Then they sprang to seize us.
Further concealment being impossible, we darted back into the valley, no longer avoiding the patches of moonlight, but rather seeking them, so we could see where we were going. We were heading for the fiord.
In a few seconds other cries arose on all sides of us. It seemed we were surrounded and that the whole region swarmed with Chinamen. Dark forms began to plunge out of the woods ahead to intercept us; the leading ones were not sixty feet away.