Meanwhile the ravenous huntresses, having come to the strip of Mulgar-scented rag, of their natures had to stop and sniff and to disport themselves with that awhile, as if to smell a dinner cooking is to enjoy it more when cooked. This done, they once more set forward with sharper hunger along Thimble's track. Three times did Thimble so play with them, and at the third appetizing rag the leopards, famished and over-eager, hardly paused at all over his keepsake, but came swiftly coursing after him. And the first, that (of her own craft) was much the younger and fleeter, soon out-distanced her hunting-mate, the which was exactly the reason of Thimble's trickery with his red flag. For when, panting and alone, the first Roses had got well ahead of the other, Thimble dashed suddenly out upon her from a rock, and before she could bare her teeth, he had caught her forefoot between his grinding jaws and bitten it clean to the bone. It spoilt poor Roses' taste for supper, and, seeing now that her sister was past fighting, and only too eager to leave the Mulgar to his lone, her mate slunk off without more ado to her own lair, to feast on the morning's bones of a frost-bitten Mullabruk.
But Thimble, though he had worsted the leopards, hadn't much liking or stomach for nights as wild as this. Thumb's nightmares were sweet peace to it. All the next day he wandered about, not heeding whither his footsteps led him. And so it came about that just before evening he stumbled upon the very same valley he had left in his sulks the morning before. There, indeed, sat Nod, fast asleep in the evening light for sheer weariness of watching for his brothers, who, some faint hope had told him, would return.
As for Thumb, after limping on up the valley a little more than a league, he soon grew ashamed and sick at heart at having so easily become a silly child again. He sat down under a great boulder, humped round with ants' nests, too desolate to go on, too proud to turn back. All that day and the next he sat moodily watching these never-idle little creatures, that, afraid of nothing, are feared of all. They had tunnelled and walled, and wherever sunbeams fell had cast back the snow that hung above the galleries. And all day long they kept going and coming, carrying syrup and eggs and meat, and all this with endless palaver of their waving horns, as if there were nothing else that side of Arakkaboa but the business of their city. Thumb alive they paid no heed to, but Thumb dead they would have picked to the bare bones before sunset.
The next evening Thumb's better head overcame him, and back he went to his brothers, sitting miserable and forlorn in the new moonlight beneath their shelter. Nothing was said. They dared scarcely look into each other's faces awhile, until Thumb caught Nod's bright, anxious little eyes glancing under his puckered forehead from brother to brother, in mortal fear they would soon be breaking out again. And Nod looked so queer, and small, and anxious, and loving, and all these things so much at once, that Thumb burst out into a roar of laughter. And there they sat all three, rocking to and fro, holding their sides beneath the gigantic steeps of Arakkaboa, happy and at peace together again, while tears ran down their nose-troughs, with their shouts on shouts of laughter.
CHAPTER XIV
Next day the travellers were about very early, combing and grooming themselves in the dawn-mist for the first time these many days, and before the sun had shot his first colours across Arakkaboa, they had eaten and drunk and set out from the valley of the languid and luscious fruits that had been the chief cause of all their folly.
They pushed up the valley, searching anxiously the hillsides for sign of any track or path by which they might ascend. The day was crisp and golden with sunlight. And that evening they made their night-quarters beside a vast frozen pool in a kind of cup of the overhanging cliffs. Here every word they said came hollowly back in echo.