her chance." Bang! following
upon a puff of smoke, and the bird with the long train stopped in its
flight, shot up a few yards, and then fell motionless.

Ned uttered a cheer, and the whole party hurried forward, to reach the
prize some time after Murray, who had reloaded and was carefully
smoothing the bird's plumage.

"A long shot, Ned," he said. "That must have been fully eighty yards.
It was the large shot did it. There, you never saw a peacock like
that."

"Yes," cried Ned, "often."

"No, my lad; look again."

"Well, it is a little different. The neck's green."

"Yes, instead of blue. That's the Javanese peacock, and a splendid
specimen. We'll hang this up till our return. Anything likely to touch
it if we hang it on a branch?"

"No, I think not, sir," replied Frank; and after the bird had been
carefully suspended fully six feet from the ground, the party walked on,
to find that the ground was beginning to rise steadily, an indication of
their nearing the hills.

"So that's the bird you wanted me to find, was it?" said Murray, after a
long silent tramp, for the bush had grown rather dense.

"Oh no. The birds I mean only come out of a night. I've only seen two
since I've been here, but you can hear them often in the jungle."

"Owls?"

"Oh no; pheasants, father says they are. Birds with tremendously long
tails, and wings all over great spots like a peacock's, only brown."

"Argus pheasants," said Murray, quietly. "Yes, I must try and get some
specimens of them."

The ground began to rise more rapidly now, till it was quite a climb
through open forest, very different to the dense jungle by the
river-side. The ground, too, had become stony, with great gray masses
projecting here and there, and still they rose higher and higher, till,
hot and breathless, they stopped in a narrow gorge to look back at the
narrow plain they had crossed, just beyond which, and fringed on the far
side by the dark jungle, they could see the river winding along like a
ribbon of silver.

There were several umbrageous trees here, and the air was so fresh and
comparatively cool that it was decided to halt now for an hour to rest.
Then, after a good look round had been taken, Murray suggested that they
should return by another route to where the peacock had been hung, after
which they could go direct to the boat.

The Malays lay down and began preparing fresh pieces of betel-nut to
chew; but Murray's rest was short