The Daredevil Snared (The Adventurers Quartet Book 3) by Stephanie Laurens

feet by now.”
    Caleb swallowed a mouthful of water, then nodded. “I keep wondering if we’ve missed a concealed turn-off, but the traffic on the path is as heavy as ever, and it’s still going in the same direction.”
    They’d been speaking quietly, and their men had, too, but Phillipe glanced around and murmured, “I think, perhaps, that when we go on, we should keep talking to a minimum.”
    Caleb restoppered his water skin. “At least until we’ve found the mine. The jungle’s so much thicker here, we could turn a corner and find ourselves there. We don’t want to advertise our presence, and we definitely don’t want to engage.”
    Phillipe’s long lips quirked wryly. “No matter how much we might wish otherwise.”
    Caleb grunted and pushed to his feet. Phillipe followed suit, and three minutes later, their party set off again, tramping rather more quietly through the increasingly dense jungle.
    Fifteen minutes later, their caution proved critical. Caleb caught a fleeting glimpse of something pale flitting about a clearing ahead and off the path to their right. Phillipe was in the lead. His eyes glued to the shifting gleam, Caleb seized his friend’s arm and halted. Their men noticed and froze.
    Phillipe shifted to stand alongside Caleb, the better to follow his gaze. The intervening boles and large-leafed palms made following anyone’s line of sight difficult.
    Caleb couldn’t work out what he was seeing—a gleam of gold, a flash of...what?
    Then the object of his gaze moved, and Caleb finally had a clear view. “It’s a boy,” he breathed. “A golden-haired, fair-skinned boy in ragged clothes.”
    “He’s picking those berries,” Phillipe whispered. After a moment, he added, “What do you want to do?”
    Caleb scanned the area. “As far as I can tell, he’s alone. I can’t see anyone else, can you?”
    “No. And I can’t hear anyone else, either.”
    “If we all appear, he’ll take fright and run.” Caleb considered, then shrugged off the pack he’d been carrying and handed it to Phillipe. “Keep everyone here until I signal.”
    Accepting the pack, Phillipe nodded.
    Caleb made his way quietly toward the boy, dodging around trees and taking care not to alert his quarry. The lad looked to be about eight, but woefully thin—all knees and elbows. He was wearing a tattered pair of dun-colored shorts and a loose tunic of the same coarse material. It had been the bright cap of his fair hair, gleaming as the boy passed through the stray sunbeams that struck through the thick canopy, that had attracted Caleb’s attention.
    The boy was circling a vine that had grown into a clump, almost filling one of the small clearings created when a large tree had fallen. The bushy vine bore plump, dark-red berries that Caleb and his company had already discovered were edible and sweet. His attention fixed on his task, the boy steadily plucked berries and dropped them into a woven basket.
    Despite the boy’s bare feet, the basket suggested he hailed from a group of some kind; from the features Caleb glimpsed as the boy moved about the bush, the lad was almost certainly English.
    He had to be from the mine.
    Caleb reached the edge of the clearing. He hesitated, then said, “Don’t be afraid—please don’t run away.”
    The boy jerked and whipped around. He grabbed up the basket, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the handle.
    His blue eyes wide, the boy stared at Caleb.
    Caleb didn’t move other than to slowly display his hands, palms open and clearly empty, out to either side.
    The boy was poised to flee.
    If he did, Caleb doubted he could catch him, not in this terrain. “I’ve been sent to look for people—English people kidnapped from Freetown.” He spoke slowly, clearly, evenly. “We think they’re being used as labor for a mine. We’re searching for the mine.” He paused, then asked, “Do you know where the mine is?”
    When the boy didn’t respond, Caleb remembered that the