Rob Harlow's Adventures: A Story of the Grand Chaco

“Don’t they bite, sir?”
“Bite?”
Smick! smack! flap !
“Oh, murder!”
“What’s the matter, sir?”
“My hand.”
“Hurt it, sir?”
“I should think I have.”
“You should wait till they’ve sucked ’emselves full and then hit ’em; they’re lazy then. Too quick for you now.”
“The wretches! I shall be spotted all over, like a currant dumpling. I say, Shaddy, do they always bite like this?”
“Well, yes, sir,” said the man addressed, about as ugly a specimen of humanity as could be met in a day’s march, for he had only one eye, and beneath that a peculiar, puckered scar extending down to the corner of his mouth, shaggy short hair, neither black nor grey—a kind of pepper-and-salt colour—yellow teeth in a very large mouth, and a skin so dark and hairy that he looked like some kind of savage, dressed in a pair of canvas trousers and a shirt that had once been scarlet, but was now stained, faded, and rubbed into a neutral grub or warm earthy tint. He wore no braces, but a kind of belt of what seemed to be snake or lizard skin, fastened with either a silver or pewter buckle. Add to this the fact that his feet were bare, his sleeves rolled up over his mahogany-coloured arms, and that his shirt was open at the throat, showing his full neck and hairy chest; add also that he was about five feet, nine, very broad-shouldered and muscular, and you have Shadrach Naylor, about the last person any one would take to be an Englishman or select for a companion on a trip up one of the grandest rivers of South America.