There is nothing more terrible than these private duels in America, during which the two adversaries seek each other across thickets, and hunt each other like wild animals.  It is then that each must envy those marvellous qualities so natural to the Indians of the prairies, their rapid intelligence, their ingenious ruse, their scent of the enemy.  An error, a hesitation, a wrong step, may cause death.  In these meetings the Yankees are often accompanied by their dogs, and both sportsmen and game go on for hours.

“What demons you are!” exclaimed Michel Ardan, when his companion had depicted the scene with much energy.

“We are what we are,” answered J.T.  Maston modestly; “but let us make haste.”

In vain did Michel Ardan and he rush across the plain still wet with dew, jump the creeks, take the shortest cuts; they could not reach Skersnaw Wood before half-past five.  Barbicane must have entered it half-an-hour before.

There an old bushman was tying up faggots his axe had cut.

Maston ran to him crying—­

“Have you seen a man enter the wood armed with a rifle?  Barbicane, the president—­my best friend?”

The worthy secretary of the Gun Club thought naively that all the world must know his president.  But the bushman did not seem to understand.

“A sportsman,” then said Ardan.

“A sportsman?  Yes,” answered the bushman.

“Is it long since?”

“About an hour ago.”

“Too late!” exclaimed Maston.

“Have you heard any firing?” asked Michel Ardan.

“No.”

“Not one shot?”

“Not one.  That sportsman does not seem to bag much game!”

“What shall we do?” said Maston.

“Enter the wood at the risk of catching a bullet not meant for us.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Maston, with an unmistakable accent, “I would rather have ten bullets in my head than one in Barbicane’s head.”

“Go ahead, then!” said Ardan, pressing his companion’s hand.

A few seconds after the two companions disappeared in a copse.  It was a dense thicket made of huge cypresses, sycamores, tulip-trees, olives, tamarinds, oaks, and magnolias.  The different trees intermingled their branches in inextricable confusion, and quite hid the view.  Michel Ardan and Maston walked on side by side phasing silently through the tall grass, making a road for themselves through the vigorous creepers, looking in all the bushes or branches lost in the sombre shade of the foliage, and expecting to hear a shot at every step.  As to the traces that Barbicane must have left of his passage through the wood, it was impossible for them to see them, and they marched blindly on in the hardly-formed paths in which an Indian would have followed his adversary step by step.

After a vain search of about an hour’s length the two companions stopped.  Their anxiety was redoubled.

“It must be all over,” said Maston in despair.  “A man like Barbicane would not lay traps or condescend to any manoeuvre!  He is too frank, too courageous.  He has gone straight into danger, and doubtless far enough from the bushman for the wind to carry off the noise of the shot!”