A SCREAM AND--SILENCE
I am afraid that no one slept very well after that.
It was about seven o'clock when we left that place. And I confess
that I was more uneasy, more troubled than I would have cared to
acknowledge. For we were headed toward the spot--at any rate, in the
direction--whence had come that scream. What would we find there? Would
we find anything?
We did.
We had gone about an eighth of a mile. The disposition of our little
party was as it had been the day before; Rhodes and Ondonarkus, that
is, were in the lead, followed by Drorathusa, then came Nandradelphis
and Silvisiris, whilst Zenvothunbro and myself formed the rear-guard.
Had my own wishes in the matter been followed, Rhodes and I would
have been together. The formation assumed was, as I believe I have
mentioned, the one that Drorathusa herself desired. The idea, of
course, was to have the front and rear protected each by one of the
mysterious weapons of the mysterious stranger-men, which weapons,
undoubtedly, were far more formidable in the imagination of Drorathusa
and her companions than they were in reality.
Certainly our revolvers were in every way excellent weapons, but I
could not help wishing that they had a heavier bullet.
As has been said, we had proceeded about a furlong. The dense and
tangled undergrowth had forced us away from the stream, to a distance
of perhaps three hundred feet.
At the moment a sound had fetched me up and my exclamation had brought
the party to a sudden halt.
"What is it, Bill?" Rhodes asked.
"We are being _followed_!"
He made no immediate response to that dire intelligence. We all stood
listening, waiting; but a silence pervaded the forest as deep as though
it had never, since the day of creation, been broken by the faintest
pulsation of sound.
Then, after some moments, Rhodes asked:
"Are you sure, Bill, that we are being followed?"
"Yes! I tell you that I know that we are!"
"Well," said he, turning slowly, "I don't see that we can do anything
about it, save keep a sharp lookout; and so on we go."
Whereupon he and the others started. I had turned to follow when that
sound, low and mysterious as before, stopped me in my tracks. And
in that very instant came another--a sharp interjection from Rhodes,
instantaneously followed by a scream, the short, piercing scream of a
woman.
I should have explained that we were in a dense growth of fern, a
growth some ten or twelve feet in height; it was a meet place indeed
for an ambuscade. Overhead, too, the branches met and intertangled,
affording an excellent place for a snake-cat or some other arboreal
monster to lie in wait and drop or spring upon any human or brute
passing below.
Now, as I whirled to that exclamation and scream--the danger there
behind forgotten in what was so imminent before--it was to find, to my
indescribable fear and horror, that my companions, every single one of
them, had vanished.
And that which chilled my heart was enhanced by the fact that before
me, where Rhodes and the Dromans _must_ be; there was no agitation
amongst the ferns, not the slightest movement amongst them. I was
alone, alone in that place of dense, concealing vegetation, of silence
and mystery. But no; they were there, my companions, right there before
me. The ferns hid them, that was all. But why were they so still? Why
utterly silent? What had happened? That exclamation, that scream, the
silence that had followed--what did it mean?
It has taken some space to set this down, but it must not be imagined
that the space itself during which I stood there was a long one. It
was, in fact, very brief; it was no more, I suppose, than fifteen or
twenty seconds. Then I was moving forward through the crushed ferns,
as swiftly as was consistent with caution, and, of course, with the
revolver gripped ready for instant action.
I had covered perhaps three yards, had reached the point where the
way crushed through the fern-growth turned sharp to the left to pass
between two great tree-trunks; then it was that I heard it--a low,
rustling sound and close at hand.
Something was moving there; it was moving toward me.