While thus engaged, Smith scanned the surroundings with some curiosity.  The stream, in cutting its way through the hillside, had hollowed it out in a gentle curve.  The channel itself threaded the base of a huge natural cutting, most of which was covered with trees, only the middle part, where the torrent had laid bare a path, being comparatively clear.  All around were trees large and small, tall and stunted, leafy and bare.  As Smith’s eye travelled upward, he noticed about a hundred and fifty yards distant, almost at the top of the gorge, a small ape-like form flitting across a part of the forest that was a little thinner than the rest.

“See that, Roddy?” he said.

Rodier looked round.

“What, mister?”

“An ape, I fancy, perhaps an orang-outang.  I know they infest the forests of the Malayan archipelago, but I can’t call to mind that they’re natives of New Guinea.”

“All the natives of New Guinea are apes,” said Rodier viciously.  “At Port Moresby they came round me like monkeys at the Zoo.”

“There he is!  Do you see him?”

Smith’s hand stole mechanically to his hip pocket, where he kept his revolver.  Then he smiled, remembering that the chances of stopping an orang-outang with a revolver bullet were about one in ten thousand.

“I don’t see him, mister.”

“He has disappeared.  But, my word, Roddy, there’s another, and another—­four or five; look at them, in the undergrowth yonder.  I don’t like this.  They’re savage beasts if offended, and if they attack us we shall be in rather a tight corner.”

He rose, keeping his eye on the spot where the ape-like forms had shown themselves for an instant, to vanish again.  As his eye became accustomed to the gloomy depths of the forest, he became still more alarmed to see a number of black, apish faces at various points among the thick undergrowth surrounding the clearing.  Another form flitted across the thin open space in which he had seen the first.

“By George! he’s got a bow in his hand.  They’re men!  This is worse still.  The orang-outang is bad enough, but he avoids men, I believe, unless interfered with or alarmed.  These forest savages are dead shots with their arrows, and they’ll look on us as intruders.  If they’re as spiteful as most of their kind we shall have trouble.  Get your revolver ready, but we must pretend we haven’t noticed them.  You’ve got to replace those plugs; do it as quickly as you can.  Don’t look round; I’ll keep guard.”

He saw several of the savages pass across in the same direction as the first, and now he noticed, what had escaped him before, that they were diminutive creatures, certainly not more than four feet high.  He had clearly stumbled upon a settlement of forest pigmies.  From what he had read of pigmy races he knew that it required extreme patience and a great expenditure of time to win their confidence.  That was out of the question now.  His first impulse was to