In this way we passed the five miles that lay between Dead Man’s Elbow and the bayou on the banks of which we had stopped to eat our dinner.
As we rode through the camp, Sandy dismounted long enough to secure possession of the squirrels he had shot a few hours before, and which still lay at the root of the tree where he had left them.
“Mebbe we won’t see home to-night,” said he, “so I’ll take these along; ’cause I know by experience that it is monstrous lonesome campin’ in the woods without nothing to eat.”
Luke Redman started when he heard this remark, and an expression of great satisfaction settled on his scowling face. I noticed, too, that after we left the bayou he began to cast stealthy glances around him, as if he were looking for some one; and once I saw his gaze fastened earnestly upon a cluster of bushes which grew on a neighboring ridge, running parallel with the one we were following.
I scrutinized the thicket closely, and would have been willing to declare that I saw a coonskin cap, under which were a pair of eyes regarding us intently. But the cap vanished at the very moment I caught sight of it, and believing that I had been mistaken, I said nothing about it to my companions.
In less than half an hour after we left our old camp, night began to settle down upon us, and before we had accomplished another mile, it was so dark that we could scarcely distinguish one another’s features.
The storm had all the while been increasing in fury, and now the rain and sleet came down in torrents, and it was not many minutes before we were all drenched to the skin. The cold and darkness grew more intense, and, to add to the unpleasantness of our situation, we reached the end of the ridge at last, and from that point our way lay across a bottom ten miles wide, which was covered with mud and ice, thickets of cane and blackberry briers, and studded with cypress knees, which rendered our progress slow and laborious.
“Duke,” said Sandy, at length—and I could tell by the tones of his voice that he was shaking with the cold—“strike up a whistle. It is so dark we can’t see to foller you.”
“I am too nearly frozen to whistle,” replied Duke. “It is all I can do to talk. That isn’t the worst of it, either. I am afraid we are lost.”