Despair began to get the upper hand, when I caught the dull boom of a pistol-shot, and it so startled me that I could not decide the direction it came from.  I stopped to listen, afraid that Thirkle had found Captain Riggs and Rajah.

Soon there was another report, and then a third, and what puzzled me most was that they seemed to be just where I had come from.  The echoes came back to me from the hills and died away in dismal reverberations in the jungle.  It seemed to be some signal, but, whether from the captain or Thirkle, I had no way of knowing.

I was tempted to fire a shot in reply, but, deciding to wait for another, I turned in my tracks and started back, although not on the same trail I had come over, but to the right of it.

I blamed myself for leaving the captain, for I should have kept with him, no matter what happened.  I had made a fine mess of my scouting trip, but found some excuse for myself in the fact that I did right in following Long Jim and Petrak, and had a good reason to believe that they were going to the pirate camp.

I tried to reason out the significance of the three shots I had heard.  They might mean that Captain Riggs had fired on Thirkle, or that Thirkle had fired on him.  In a kind of frenzy at my own helplessness I figured the various combinations of the three shots as I went along, but all the time I was in a frantic haste to find the trail.

Finally I found the dry bed of a little stream; but a careful search showed no signs of any person having been over it, and it seemed to me, in my upset sense of direction, that it should lead the other way.  But, remembering that I had left the bed of the creek to follow Long Jim and Petrak, I came to the conclusion that the pirates had abandoned the creek, or had turned off from it to cache the gold.

I started down it, hoping that it was the one which would lead me to the captain.  My courage was freshened, and, taking a slow trot jumping from stones to the hard sand, dodging over-hanging branches, and scrambling up on the banks to avoid creepers, I covered a great deal of ground in a short time.  I kept close watch on the clear spaces for tracks, and carried my two pistols in the front of my belt, Long Jim’s pair well behind.

I was running and jumping along in this way, as quietly as possible, when I heard a low, peculiar gruff growl.  I stopped in my tracks and listened.  Crawling into the bushes I rested on my knees with a pistol in each hand, my mouth wide open so as to breathe silently, for I was panting from my flight.

“Ye didn’t look to Bucky for this, did ye?” I heard Buckrow say, so close at hand that, it startled me.  There was no reply to his question, and after a few minutes I crawled toward him.  I found myself in an outcrop of volcanic rock, and beyond the face of a sheer ledge.  The soil was moist ten feet away from the bed of the stream, and bamboo and the thick, coarse colgon grass was as high as my shoulder.