et,
picking their way by the moonlight. Two or three times they passed peons
in the path, but their bold bearing and the pistols in their belts
always gave them the road. Brigands flourished amid the frequent
revolutions, and the humbler Mexicans found it wise to attend strictly
to their own business. They slept again in the open, but this time on a
hill in a dense thicket. They had previously drunk at a spring at its
base, and lacking now for neither food nor water they felt hope rising
continually.

Ned had no dreams the second night, and both awoke at dawn. On the far
side of the hill, they found a pool in which they bathed, and with
breakfast following they felt that they had never been stronger. Their
food was made up in two packs, one for each, and they calculated that
with economy it would last two days. They could also reckon upon further
supplies from wild fruits, and perhaps more frijoles and tortillas from
the people themselves. When they had summed up all their circumstances,
they concluded that they were not in such bad condition. Armed, strong
and bold, they might yet traverse the thousand miles to Texas.

Light of heart and foot they started. Off to the left the great silver
head of Orizaba looked down at them benignantly, and before them they
saw the vast flowering robe of the tierra caliente into which they
pushed boldly, even as Cortez and his men had entered it.

Ned was almost overpowered by a vegetation so grand and magnificent.
Except on the paths which they followed, it was an immense and tangled
mass of gigantic trees and huge lianas. Many of the lianas had wound
themselves like huge serpents about the trees and had gradually pulled
them, no matter how strong, into strange and distorted shapes. Overhead
parrots and paroquets chattered amid the vast and gorgeous bloom of red
and pink, yellow and white. Ned and Obed were forced to keep to the
narrow peon paths, because elsewhere one often could not pass save
behind an army of axes.

The trees were almost innumerable in variety. They saw mahogany,
rosewood, Spanish cedar and many others that they did not know. They
also saw the cactus and the palm, turned by the struggle for existence
in this tremendous forest, into climbing plants. Obed noted these facts
with his sharp eye.

"It's funny that the cactus and the palm have to climb to live," he
said, "but they've done it. It isn't any funnier, however, than the
fact that the whale lived on land