rchids hanging down?"

Brazier raised a little double glass which he carried to his eyes, and
examined a great cluster of lovely blossoms hanging from an old,
half-decayed branch projecting over the river.

"Yes," he cried, "lovely. Well, Naylor, how soon are we to land or run
up some creek?"

"Arter two or three days," said the guide.

"But hang it, man, the bank yonder is crowded with vegetable treasures."

"What! them?" said Shaddy, with a contemptuous snort. "I don't call
them anything. You just wait, sir, and trust me. You shall see
something worth coming after by-and-by."

"Well, run the boat in closer to the shore, so that I can examine the
plants as we go along. The water looks deep, and the wind's right. You
could get within a dozen yards of the trees."

"I could get so as you might touch 'em, sir. There's plenty of water,
but I'm not going no closer than this."

"Why?"

"Because I know that part along there. We can't see nobody, but I
dessay there's Injuns watching us all the time from among the leaves,
and if we went closer they might have a shot at us."

"Then they have guns?"

"No, sir, bows and arrows some of 'em, but mostly blowpipes."

"With poisoned arrows?"

"That's so, sir, and, what's worse, they know how to use 'em. They hit
a man I knew once with a tiny bit of an arrow thing, only a wood point
as broke off in the wound--wound, it weren't worth calling a wound, but
the little top was poisoned, and before night he was a dead man."

"From the poison?"

"That's it, sir. He laughed at it at first. The bit of an arrow, like
a thin skewer with a tuft of cotton wool on the end, didn't look as if
it could hurt a strong man as I picked it up and looked where the point
had been nearly sawed off all round."

"What, to make it break off?" cried Rob.

"That's so, my lad. When they're going to use an arrow they put the
point between the teeth of a little fish's jaw--sort o' pirana thing
like them here in the river. Then they give the arrow a twiddle round,
and the sharp teeth nearly eat it through, and when it hits and sticks
in a wound the point breaks off, and I wouldn't give much for any one
who ever got one of those bits of sharp wood in their skins."

"What a pleasant look-out!" said Brazier. "Oh, it's right enough, sir.
The thing is to go up parts where there are no Indians, and that's where
I'm going to take you. I say, look at that open patch yonder, where
there's a b