Bunyip Land, page 239 by George Manville Fenn
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p>"We can do nothing yet," he replied, "but wait for an opportunity to get him away."
"Can you not make some plan?" I whispered back.
"Hist!"
He pressed my hand, for I had been growing louder of speech in my excitement, and just then there was a fresh outburst of voices from within the hut, followed by the trampling of feet and loud shouting, which seemed to be crossing the village and going farther away.
"They have taken the prisoner to--"
Our companion said the first words excitedly, and then stopped short.
"Where?" I exclaimed aloud, as I caught at his arm.
He answered me in the savage tongue, and with an impatient stamp of the foot I turned to the doctor.
"What can we do?" I said. "It makes me wish to be a prisoner too. I should see him, perhaps, and I could talk to him and tell him that help was near."
"While you shut up part of the help, and raised expectations in his breast, that would perhaps result in disappointment," replied the doctor. "We must wait, my lad, wait. The savages are excited and alarmed, and we must come when their suspicions are at rest."
"What do you mean?" I said. "Do you mean to go back to-night without him?"
"Not if we can get him away," he said; "but we must not do anything mad or rash."
"No, no, of course not," I said despairingly; "but this is horrible: to be so close to him and yet able to do nothing!"
"Be patient, my lad," he whispered, "and speak lower. We have done wonders. We have come into this unknown wild, and actually have found that the lost man is alive. What is more, we have come, as if led by blind instinct, to the very place where he is a prisoner, and we almost know the hut in which he is confined."
"Yes, yes. I know all that," I said; "but it is so hard not to be able to help him now."
"We are helping him," said the doctor. "Just think: we have this poor half-dazed fellow to glean some information, and we have a hiding-place near, and--Look out!"
I turned