X.
WHAT passed between them I could not hear. They talked in whispers, very swiftly. The girl sat up, wide-eyed. The hillman lay beside her, watching me and the lad.
It was not hard to guess, however, what he was saying. Plainly he was urging her to leave the cavern, and she was refusing, although clearly alarmed. There was something like fear in the man’s diminutive features, and he even tried to drag her away from the fire.
Mary shook his hand from her arm, and the hillman faded out of the cavern. I mean just that. Without rising from the earth floor, he disappeared. The girl sat where she was for a moment. Then she sprang to Stuart’s side and touched his cheek gently. I could see her eyes grow soft as she did it.
The lad yawned and opened his eyes slowly, having slept heavily, as is the way of youth. Mary paid no attention to me. She began talking to Stuart rapidly, shaking him and pointing to the mouth of the cavern. He was wide awake now, and they began that curious pantomime which was their way of conversing together.
I replenished the fire and picked up my rifle, not wishing to be bush-whacked by another dwarf. For all they cared, I might have been back on the Madeleine.
Presently Stuart turned to me with a frown.
“Mary is frightened by something,” he said. “And she wants us to go away from here. Says it’s dangerous. What do you suppose is up?”
“Not being a mind reader,” I grumbled, “it’s hard to say.”
With that I set about getting breakfast, while the two of them fell to talking —if you can call it that—again. She held his hand tightly, trying to pull him toward the cavern entrance, on tiptoe with eagerness, and her voice soft with love. Stuart looked at her smilingly.
“I can’t make her out,” he said to me. “Somebody has warned her to leave this spot. She knows what this danger is, but she can’t make it clear to me. It comes along about every moon and the hillmen always flee. She goes with them, of course.”
I thought of the scared dwarf who had visited us. Yes, the hillmen were undoubtedly afraid and the girl shared their fear.
“Let’s breakfast, anyway,” he said. “I’m uncommonly hungry.”
That is always the way with an Englishman. Tell him he’s to crawl into a tiger’s den and he’ll ask for his breakfast first and complain because the tea isn’t strong enough. Mary, however, had lost her appetite. She sat huddled up by Stuart, every now and then coaxing him softly while he stowed away a mess of tea and biscuits.
All the time I was busy thinking. There were plenty of dangerous things—more or less on Santo—not the least being the hillmen themselves. Snakes and fever, for example. Still, I could not figure out what Mary feared. It might be wild pigs—some of the boars have rather formidable tusks. But then the hillmen were tree climbers and would have no especial fear of pigs.
By the time we had finished the meal Mary was crying. Not sobbing noisily like a white woman, but silently, the tears running down her smooth cheeks. It stirred the lad mightily, and he put his arm around her, talking to her reassuringly. Whereupon she pulled his head down to hers in a close embrace.
I left the cavern. After all, Stuart’s feeling for the girl was not strictly my affair. And I wanted to see what was going on outside the cavern.
Stuart joined me almost at once, Mary with him. It was broad day by then. There was nothing to be seen except the usual tangle of bush. It seemed to me, however, that on either side of the cavern the undergrowth was clear, as if a trail ran past the spot. I pointed this out to Stuart and he questioned Mary.
“She says,” he interpreted, “that this is a kind of pass between two mountains, and the danger, whatever it is, is coming along here. She wants us to take to the trees with her.”
“You can,” I growled. “I feel safer here. You don’t suppose it’s the coast tribes?”
“They don’t come into the interior.”
That was true. I’d forgotten it for the moment. By this time Mary was almost frantic. Her cheeks were flushed and she was breathing at a rapid-fire rate. They say most women look ugly when they cry. Mary was prettier. Stuart watched her hungrily.
Why didn’t he go with her? Well, I had said I would not, and of course Stuart refused to leave me. The branches near by were shaking strangely and I guessed the hillmen were hurrying by. I caught a glimpse or two of a brown body swinging from limb to limb like a monkey, at unbelievable speed.
Then Mary could stand it no longer. She threw down die old Bible—which she had brought from the cave—and fled away, pointing to the bush behind her. I heard her crying from the branches of a tree for a moment. After that a complete silence fell on the part of Santo where we stood.
The rustling in the trees had ceased. Even the cockatoos seemed to have left the grove. Stuart fingered his rifle with a queer smile.
“What do you make of it, old man?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I told him. “Except that we had better keep our eyes open. It might be a big tree snake. They are sometimes as hefty as constrictors.”
It had occurred to me that this was what the hillmen feared. I admit I was uneasy, standing there in the open space of the trail, looking down the sun-spotted vista of greenery. Stuart was silent for a long moment.
“Something is coming through the bush, old fellow,” he said quietly after a long moment.
I was aware of it at the same time—a movement in the bushes some distance away. It was not loud, but it came toward us steadily, from the direction that Mary had pointed out to us.
Stuart and I both lifted our rifles. He kneeled in order to get a better rest. My eyes were glued to the green thicket, expecting to see the head of a snake slip through—or worse. My nerves are steadier than the average, I fancy. It only goes to show that a man can be worked up, given a little time to be afraid.
The bushes were shaking now. Stuart took careful aim and pressed the trigger. At the same instant I knocked his gun aside with my knee. It was fortunate I did so, for the boy was an accurate shot.
Through the bushes I had seen the head of a man. An old man, and a white man.