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In the centre of all was a very fierce fire which had been made of brushwood placed in a circle, so as to leave a clear space of twelve feet in the middle. A pole stood up in the centre of this clearing, and something all mottled with red and black was tied up against it. De Catinat stepped swiftly in front of Adele that she might not see the dreadful thing, but he was too late.
Advancing cautiously, the travellers arrived at the brink of a dark ravine, in the bottom of which there was a good deal of brushwood, with here and there several pools of water.
A belt of thick brushwood and low trees lay before me, clinging to the slope, and as I pushed with great difficulty and many turns to right and left through its tangle a wisp of cloud enveloped me, and from that time on I was now in, now out, of a deceptive drifting fog, in which it was most difficult to gauge one's progress.
The little rise was but a short distance from camp, the country beyond was open but was covered with low brushwood. As soon as they were over the brow and were assured that none of those who had left the camp before them were in sight, they plunged into the brushwood, and, making their way on their hands and knees for a few hundred yards, lay down in the midst of it.
She is not burnt, only because as she ran in the light breeze there was no wind to set the peat aflame. They meant her to burn when she was in the open sea when the spark they set in the turf should have had time to grow to flame, and fire the brushwood. Look at those two tar barrels set handy." "Aye," I said, for all this had been growing on me.
After an hour's struggle with the brushwood and fallen timber the party was halted by a huge spruce tree which had fallen fair across the trail. "Where now, boss?" cried Larry to Nora, who from her superior knowledge of the ground, had been leading the party. "This is something new," answered Nora. "I think we should cross the water and try to break through to the left around the top of the tree."
This was overgrown at the top with cedars and brushwood, forming something of a cave, ten or twelve feet wide and twice as deep, the bottom of which was of rock and fairly smooth. "I camped here two winters ago," said John Barrow, as he called a halt. "I laced up the cedars above and they formed a fust-rate roof." "I guess they are pretty well laced still," observed Dick.
Crouch down here among the sumach, until we see who it is who walks so boldly through the woods." They stooped all four among the brushwood, peeping out between the tree trunks at a little glade towards which Amos was looking.
The valley was pretty well sheltered from the cold wind, but there was very little brushwood for fuel. The Gauchos, however, soon found what, to my great surprise, made nearly as hot a fire as coals; this was the skeleton of a bullock lately killed, from which the flesh had been picked by the carrion-hawks.
Then they spurred across the rough boggy land, farther away than the shaft was. Here the ground lay jagged and shaggy, wrought up with high tufts of reed, or scragged with stunted brushwood. It is not to be marvelled at that amid such place as this, for the first time visited, the horses were a little skeary; and their riders partook of the feeling, as all good riders do.
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