which we had come,and as if he had suddenly come to the conclusion that any other pathwould be preferable, Holman dropped upon his knees and lowered himselfupon a ledge that was immediately below.
"Come on, Verslun!" he cried, in a choked voice that was altogetherdifferent from his cheery tones. "If there is no path we must roll down.There's the first flush of the dawn!"
I looked toward the east and groaned. The faint grayish tint unnervedme. Although it was possible that Leith had already reached the camp,still we had promised the two girls that we would return by daylight,and although we had a hazy notion as to what we would do when we didreach their side, the longing to get there made us oblivious of danger.I swung down on to the crumbling foothold that supported Holman, andbreathlessly we began to scramble toward the valley.
It was a mad climb. Holman exhibited a temerity that bordered oninsanity. With reckless daring he scrambled down upon dangerous nichesthat jutted out upon the face of the cliff, and my repeated warningsfell upon deaf ears. A task that would have appeared impossible whenviewed in daylight, lost half of its terrors because we only vaguelyapprehended the dangers that threatened us when a layer of shalecrumbled beneath our feet. Our descent became a wild toboggan. Slippingand sliding, clutching wildly at every little projection that woulddecrease the speed at which we were travelling, we rolled with bruisedand bleeding bodies on to a small platform, and lay half stunned for amoment, as a thousand pieces of rock, dislodged by our bodies, bouncedpast us into the valley.
Holman picked himself up and looked around. The pink flush had deepenedin the east, and nearby objects were discernible.
"By all the gods! we are back on the ledge near the crevice!" he cried."Come along and we'll hunt for Kaipi."
It was wonderful how we had pulled up in our slide near the place wherewe had witnessed the performance that prompted us to make the ascent.But there was no mistake about the spot. As we crawled along theplatform we found that we had landed not more than twenty feet from thecrevice through which we had witnessed the blood-curdling "tivo," and wehurried toward the spot where we had left the Fijian, whose nerves hadbeen upset by the glimpse he had had of the strange antics of thedancers.
But Kaipi was not at the spot where we had left him. Whether his fearshad increased to such an extent that they had forced him to leave theplace, or whether he had come to the conclusion that we had returned tothe camp by some other route, we could not determine; so wasting no timeon useless conjecture we hurried toward the big maupei tree up which wehad climbed to reach the ledge.
But Holman's hurry proved disastrous. He had escaped the dangers of thecliff descent to meet an accident when he had sufficient light to seewhat he was about. In reaching for the limb of the tree that threshedagainst the cliff, he lost his footing, and before I could grip him hewent crashing through the foliage to the ground, some fifty feet below!
I thought that I was an hour descending that tree, but I could not havebeen more than three minutes if my skinned legs could be relied upon asevidence of speed. I found Holman in a thorny tangle, and as I draggedhim into the open he groaned loudly and endeavoured to get upon hisfeet.
"Are you hurt?" I questioned.
"No, no!" he cried. "I'm not hurt, Verslun. Get me on my feet, man.Quick! For the love of God, quick!"
I gripped his shoulders and he managed to stand upright. The dawn camewith tropic suddenness at that moment, and I saw that he was bleedingfrom a nasty wound above the right temple, while he limped painfully asI helped him across a small cleared patch near the tree.
"I've hurt my leg," he cried, "but I'm going to get to the camp. If Ifall, Verslun, I want you to lend me a hand. Promise to help me, willyou? She--Miss Barbara, you know, old man. She is everything to me. Giveme a hand if I tumble down."
"I promise," I answered, and he wrung my hand as we started off throughthe clawing, scratching vines that tripped us up as we tried to fightour way forward.
If we had thought on the night before that the quarter mile of countrythat lay between the camp and the rocky wall was a difficult stretch tonegotiate, we were more than doubly certain of its impenetrablecharacter now that daylight had come. How we had ever managed to getthrough it in the darkness was a mystery that we tried to solve as weattempted to make our way back. The place was a mad riot of thornyundergrowth, laced and bound with vines that were as strong as wirehawsers. The lianas appeared human to us; they lassoed our legs andflung us sprawling upon our faces whenever we tried to quicken ourspeed. Thorns of a strange fishhook variety drove their barbed pointsinto us, and each yard of the tortuous path that we cut through thedevilish vines was marked by a scrap of our clothing, which thetormenting thorns seemed to wave aloft as an emblem of victory.
"He'll beat us!" gasped Holman. "I'm all in, Verslun; that fall hasfinished me."
"Keep at it!" I said. "We must be near the camp by now."
"We've walked three miles," muttered Holman. "We've lost our way."
"No, we haven't!" I cried. "We've struck a bad patch, but we'll getthere soon."
The youngster clenched his teeth and endeavoured to forget the agony ofhis leg, but the effort taxed his courage.
"We'll do it," I said. "Don't let the brute beat us."
"I--I won't!" he stammered. "If it was anything but my leg! Verslun!"
He fell on his face, and I helped him up, but once again he collapsed.The injured limb made it impossible for him to stand or even crawl.
"You get ahead," he cried hoarsely. "Leave me, Verslun! Leave me here!"
"But I'd never find you again," I protested.
"Yes, you would! I'll crawl out after a few hours' rest. Run to thecamp, and shoot--shoot the devil the moment you put your eyes on him!"
I took a quick glance at the matted walls of the green creepers thathedged us in on all sides. Holman was in the last stages of exhaustion,and I reasoned quickly. If I left him in the middle of the thorny tanglethat encompassed us, it would be utterly impossible for me to find himagain, and he would probably perish from thirst. If I rushed away Iwould be leaving him to certain death, and although our prospects ofleaving the island alive did not look too bright at that moment, Iconsidered that I would be making his demise a certainty by leaving himin the maze.
I stopped, gripped him round the waist, and with a great effort managedto lift him upon my shoulder. Holman's actions did not help me as Istruggled beneath him. He kicked like a madman when he understood whatI intended to do, but I held him in spite of his protests.
"Leave me here!" he screamed. "Go ahead by yourself, Verslun! What's theuse of taking me?"
"You're coming, so you can stop kicking," I muttered. "Take your fingersout of my eyes."
But Holman's struggles ceased then, and his head fell backward. The painof his leg had made the plucky youngster swoon away, and with a prayerupon my lips I sprang again at the bulwark of vicious creepers.
I have a very vague recollection of the remainder of that trip. In mysubconscious mind I have memories of an insane struggle with a junglethat was alive, of a fight with thorny creepers that pursued us. Ibecame convinced that those vines were alive, because the same thornsthat we had passed hours before rose up again in our path and waved thescraps of bloody clothing that they had torn from Holman and myself.
At last, half insane with anxiety for the safety of the girls and ourown struggles, we staggered blindly into the patch of cleared land uponwhich the camp had been pitched on the previous evening. It wasimpossible to mistake the site. The embers of the big fire were stillsmoking and we stared with sweat-blinded eyes at the place where thegirls' tent had been standing when we rushed off with Kaipi toinvestigate the light in the hills. But there was no trace of the girlsor the Professor. Leith had got ahead of us, and the big brute hadrushed the crazy scientist and his two daughters toward the hills thatstood up black and defiant above the sea of green vegetation.
CHAPTER XV
A DAY OF SKIRMISHING
We lay for a few moments upon the soft g
rass, then Holman crawled onhand and knees to the little spring of cold water and bathed the woundupon his temple and his injured leg. The water revived him, and after abrief rest he got to his feet and stared at the festooned trees thatsurrounded the spot.
"I'm ready, Verslun," he muttered. "Which way did they go?"
I pointed to the marks made in the soft ground by the shoes of the twogirls, and Holman limped forward.
"But we can't follow this fashion," I protested.
"Why not?"
"We'll be shot down before we get within half a mile of them. Leithcannot know that we have escaped from the cavern or he would have leftsome one here to interview