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After half an hour's gliding through heavy forest, and cleaving my way through spongy reed-beds, and circling round black lagoons, alive with the "plump, plump" of bullfrogs, and the interminable "r-r-r-r-r" of yabbies, I found the river on my right, with a well-beaten cattle-track along the bank. Here was something definite to go upon.
The carpenters who came to build our frame house, noticing how the sedges sunk beneath their feet, said that if they should break through, they would probably be well on their way to California before touching bottom. On the contrary, all these lake-basins are shallow as compared with their width. When we went into the Wisconsin woods there was not a single wheel-track or cattle-track.
The latter part of this was spoken in soliloquy, and, though it reached the ears of Don Juan, he did not comprehend its meaning. He was about to ask his companion for an explanation, when the latter, suddenly collecting his energies, struck the spurs into his horse, and, calling to them to follow, galloped off upon the cattle-track.
The clear-cut indentations led away from the mire up the gently-sloping ground. Suddenly they struck upon a path that was little more than a cattle-track, and instantly became mingled with other hoof-marks, older and going both ways.
I was afraid to work my way entirely by the map, for roads are apt to be vague in these parts. Ten chances to one whether you know a road when you see it; it might be a green sward, or the rubbly dry bed of a mountain torrent, or a cattle-track; it may lead somewhere or nowhere. Unassisted you may wander all manner of ways.
After half a mile, the cattle-track intersected a beaten road, with the black masses of river timber still on the right, and a wire fence on the left as I found by running into it. Everything seemed unfamiliar and puzzling; but I followed the road, looking out for landmarks, and zealously switching myself as I went along.
Sure enough, there was a cattle-track across the fallow and a culvert on the drain close to my refuge. Jim would soon be coming down that track toward the house.
They had just emerged from a narrow cattle-track where they had been forced to walk in single file on account of the bush which grew in such abundance on either side of it. Bill was leading, and as the path widened into a clearing, in which lay several fallen trees rooted out of the ground by some long-passed flood of the creek, he suddenly turned about and faced his diminutive friend.
A green cattle-track skirted the spot, without, however, emerging from the screen of fern, and this path Eustacia followed, in order to reconnoitre the group before joining it.
"Now!" exclaimed the chief in high spirits when Umtini had left, "you need not go on to the Bashee, you will have more cattle than you can drive on the Xabecca." The path the troops were passing was a mere cattle-track leading up hill, from the bed of the Xabecca river, among tangled brushwood, and occasionally passing through a cleft in the rocks.
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