“They cannot have more than three hours’ start of us,” cried Holman.  “Give me your arm, Verslun.  Now let us move as fast as we can.”

“But this is puerile,” I protested.  “We’ll be running our heads into the noose.”

“I don’t care if we do.  I want to get near Leith.”

“But we’ll never get near by running after him in this fashion.  If we could find some way to get in front of him and wait.”

“But what will happen to the girls?”

“Will our death prevent it?” I snapped.  “If we rush after him in the open we’ll throw our chances away.”

I am a sailor, absolutely ignorant of jungle knowledge, but I had sense enough to know that Leith would not leave his rear exposed for a moment after he had received word from the cave.  I tried to recall stories of extraordinary trailing feats as we stumbled forward, but I became convinced that all the marvellous performances I had ever read of had been accomplished under conditions that were altogether different from those that confronted us upon the Isle of Tears.  An open piece of country would have been a sight of joy to our eyes that were weary of the everlasting mesh of green which encompassed us like the tentacles of a malignant fate.  The green, sweaty leaves, the fat, bloated pods, and the lengths of pythonesque runners produced a mental nausea.  The vegetation appeared to us to be vicious.  Its very luxuriance produced that fear of the wild which grips one in tropical countries but which is never felt in lands situated in the temperate zones.

We had not covered a hundred yards of the path when Holman pounced upon a strip of white bark that waved to us from the thorn of a lawyer-vine crossing the track.  A few pencilled words covered the smooth side of the strip, and we absorbed them in a single glance.

“‘We’re prisoners now,’ muttered Holman, reading the few words in a whisper.  ‘The brute has declared himself.  Barbara.’”

The boy turned to me, his face all blood-smeared and haggard, and for a moment we stared at the strip of bark.  There had been no doubt in our minds concerning Leith’s intentions from the time that Kaipi brought us the message which Soma had dropped, but the knowledge that the brute had declared himself to the Professor and the two girls brought us a most horrible feeling.  In my own case I had never experienced such a sensation.  The strange rites connected with the “tivo” in the long cave had laid a foundation upon which my imagination piled skyscrapers of horror.  If I could have fixed my mind upon a definite fate that would be theirs if they were not rescued from the big brute’s clutches, I would have found relief, but my inability to do that left me a victim to thoughts that were enough to deprive one of his reason.  We looked upon the island as the ceremonial place for rites that were stamped out in the groups where the missionary had pushed himself, and the message from Barbara Herndon became a mental piledriver to ram home a thousand doubts that had obtained a footing in our minds.