ird making it, for a fine fat
mutum is well worth killing. Keep quiet and be on guard."

"Right. Go ahead."

The bushmen turned at once and stole away. The others returned to the
canoes, transported the necessary duffle to the base of the hollow tree,
made camp with a few poles, and squatted against the trunk to smoke,
watch, and wait. Several times they heard mutum calls receding in the
distance. Then came silence.

The sun-thrown shadows in the gap crawled steadily eastward. Knowlton
tested the feed of his automatic, which, since its balkiness in the
fight with the Peruvians, he had kept carefully oiled and free from the
slightest speck of rust. Tim arose at intervals and paced up and down in
sentry go, eyes and ears alert--a useless activity, but one which
provided an outlet for his restless energy. McKay let his gaze rove over
the small area visible from their post, studying the contours of the
towering trunks, the prone giant whose fall had opened the hole in the
leafy roof, the parasitical vines twined about other trees, the thin,
outflung buttresses supporting the mighty columns--all familiar sights
to him, but the only things to occupy his vision. So limned on his brain
did the scene become that after a time he could close his eyes and see
it in every important detail.

It might have been two hours after Pedro and Lourenco had departed--the
shadows had grown much longer--when over McKay stole the feeling that he
was being watched. He glanced at his companions and found that neither
of them was looking at him. Knowlton, sitting with hands clasped around
updrawn knees, was dozing. Tim, though wide awake, was staring absently
at a fungus. The captain's eyes searched the short vistas all about,
spying nothing new. Still the feeling persisted. Then all at once his
roaming gaze stopped, became fixed on a point some forty feet away.

There rose a rough-barked red-brown tree, and from it, near the ground,
projected a blackish bole. McKay was very sure the protuberance had not
been there before. He had stared steadily at that tree more than once,
and its shape was quite clear in his mind. Was that bump an insensate
wood growth now revealed for the first time by the changing sun slant,
or--

For minutes he watched it. It did not move. Then Tim, restless again,
rose directly in McKay's line of sight, yawned silently, swung his gun
to his shoulder, and began another slow parade of his self-appointed
post. When he had