Chapter 21 - Page 2

occasions Yankees are often accompanied by their dogs, and keep
up the struggle for hours.

"What demons you are!" cried Michel Ardan, when his companion
had depicted this scene to him with much energy.

"Yes, we are," replied J. T. modestly; "but we had better make haste."

Though Michel Ardan and he had crossed the plains still wet with
dew, and had taken the shortest route over creeks and ricefields,
they could not reach Skersnaw in under five hours and a half.

Barbicane must have passed the border half an hour ago.

There was an old bushman working there, occupied in selling
fagots from trees that had been leveled by his axe.

Maston ran toward him, saying, "Have you seen a man go into the
wood, armed with a rifle? Barbicane, the president, my best friend?"

The worthy secretary of the Gun Club thought that his president
must be known by all the world. But the bushman did not seem to
understand him.

"A hunter?" said Ardan.

"A hunter? Yes," replied the bushman.

"Long ago?"

"About an hour."

"Too late!" cried Maston.

"Have you heard any gunshots?" asked Ardan.

"No!"

"Not one?"

"Not one! that hunter did not look as if he knew how to hunt!"

"What is to be done?" said Maston.

"We must go into the wood, at the risk of getting a ball which
is not intended for us."

"Ah!" cried Maston, in a tone which could not be mistaken, "I would
rather have twenty balls in my own head than one in Barbicane's."

"Forward, then," said Ardan, pressing his companion's hand.

A few moments later the two friends had disappeared in the copse.
It was a dense thicket, in which rose huge cypresses, sycamores,
tulip-trees, olives, tamarinds, oaks, and magnolias.
These different trees had interwoven their branches into an
inextricable maze, through which the eye could not penetrate.
Michel Ardan and Maston walked side by side in silence through
the tall grass, cutting themselves a path through the strong
creepers, casting curious glances on the bushes, and momentarily
expecting to hear the sound of rifles. As for the traces which
Barbicane ought to have left of his passage through the wood,
there was not a vestige of them visible: so they followed the
barely perceptible paths along which Indians had tracked some
enemy, and which the dense foliage darkly overshadowed.

After an hour spent in vain pursuit the two stopped in
intensified anxiety.

"It must be all over," said Maston, discouraged. "A man like
Barbicane would not dodge with his enemy, or ensnare him, would
not even maneuver! He is too open, too brave. He has gone
straight ahead, right into the danger, and doubtless far enough