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His horse picked its way unfalteringly as it cantered forward, though Peter had to stoop very often to save his head from touching the low branches of the trees. Overhead some parakeets, disturbed in their slumbers, flew from bough to bough, their green wings and tiny red heads turning to strange colours in the moonlight.
It was generally rather silent; we did not hear such a chorus of birds and mammals as we had occasionally heard even on our overland journey, when more than once we had been awakened at dawn by the howling, screaming, yelping, and chattering of monkeys, toucans, macaws, parrots, and parakeets.
All round the hut was a large clearing, planted with maize, belonging to a Filipino, who from time to time lived in another small hut about one hundred yards away. Tall gaunt trees rose out of the corn on all sides, and in the early morning they were full of bird-life parrots, parakeets, cockatoos, pigeons, woodpeckers, gapers and hornbills, etc.
A flight of emerald parakeets tore screaming through the trees, and then far away uphill he heard the creaking of a cart. He followed the hint of a footmark, and went back up the glen slowly and thoughtfully. Presently he came to a familiar place, a group of trees, a sheet of water, and the ruins of an old embankment. It was the ancient tank of his overnight encounter. The pool of his dream?
"Do you not remember what I said, madame? I am getting it hungry enough to eat one or perhaps all of Clopin's wretched little parakeets." "You think they have to do with the hiding of the paper or the pearl, cher ami? Eh?" "I am sure of it. He would not carry the beastly little things about for nothing." "Ah, you are clever, you are very, very clever, monsieur," she made answer, with a laugh.
Puppy, I think you are a good move," stroking the ears of the mongrel dog; "a very much better move than a cage of useless parakeets that are meant to throw suspicion in the wrong direction and have a seed-cup so large and so obviously overfilled that it is safe to say there is nothing hidden in it and never has been!
By this time the sun was driving broad golden spokes through the lower branches of the mango-trees; the parakeets and doves were coming home in their hundreds; the chattering, grey-backed Seven Sisters, talking over the day's adventures, walked back and forth in twos and threes almost under the feet of the travellers; and shufflings and scufflings in the branches showed that the bats were ready to go out on the night-picket.
His eyes became oblivious of the tangled and overcrowded life about him, of the hectic orchids and huge butterflies and the flaming birds-of-paradise, of the echoing aisle ways between interwoven jungle growths, of the arching aerial roofs of verdure and the shadowy hanging-gardens from which by day parakeets chattered and monkeys screamed and by night ghostly armies of fireflies glowed.
"Madame, I shall take joy in it," Cleek replied. "But why should we talk of unpleasant things when the future looks so bright? Come, may we not give ourselves a pleasant evening? Look, there is a piano, and Count, hold my puppy for me, and please see that no one feeds him at any time. I am starving him so that he may devour some of Clopin's parakeets, because I hate the sight of the little beasts.
With a little encouragement they become tame and familiar. The parakeets were too noisy, but otherwise were most attractive little birds, as they flew to and fro and scrambled about in the top of the palm behind the house. There was one showy kind of king-bird or tyrant flycatcher, lustrous black with a white head.
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