"LOOK OUT! HOLD THAT FELLOW AWAY FROM YOU!"
"What is the thing?" asked both the up-country boys in a breath.
"A stingaree," replied Ned, "and as ugly as a rattlesnake. See how viciously he strikes with his tail! Let him down slowly till his tail touches the bottom of the boat. There! Now wait till he stops striking for a moment and then clap your foot on his tail. Ah! now you've got him. Now cut the tail off close to the body and the fellow's harmless."
"What is the creature anyhow?" asked Jack, who had suspended his fishing operations to observe the monster. "What did you call it?"
"Well, the gentleman belongs to a large and distinguished family. To speak broadly, he is a plagiostrome chondropterygian, of the sub-order raiiæ, commonly called skates. To define him more particularly, he is a member of the trygonidæ family, familiarly known as sting rays, and called by negroes and fishermen, and nearly every body else on the coast, stingarees."
"Where on earth did you get that jargon from?" asked Charley.
"It isn't jargon, and I got it from my uncle. He told me one day not to call these things stingarees, but sting rays, and then for fun rattled off a lot of scientific talk at me, which I made him repeat until I knew it by heart. What I know about sting rays is this: there are a good many kinds of them in different quarters of the world. In the North they have the American sting ray, which is much larger than ours down here, though we sometimes catch them two or three feet wide. Ours is the European sting ray, I believe; at any rate, it isn't the American. They are all of them closely alike. They are brown on top and white beneath. You see the shape—not unlike that of a turtle, but with something like wings at the sides, and with a skin instead of a shell, and no legs. The most interesting things about them are their long, slender tails. See," picking up the amputated tail and turning it over; "see the gentleman's weapons. Those bony spikes, with their barbed sides, make very ugly wounds whenever the sting ray gets a good shot at a leg or an arm. The negroes say the barbs are poisonous, like a rattlesnake's fangs; but the scientific folk dispute that. However that may be, a man was laid up for three months right here in Bluffton, during the war, with a foot so bad that the surgeons thought they would have to cut it off, and all from a very slight wound by a sting-ray."
"Ugh!" cried Jack. "It isn't necessary to suppose poison; to have one of those horrible bones driven into your flesh and then drawn out with the notches all turned the wrong way, is enough to make any amount of trouble, without adding poison."
"Perhaps that accounts for the stories told of the Indians shooting poisoned arrows," said Ned. "They used sting-ray stings for arrow-heads at any rate."
"And very capital arrow-heads they would make," said Charley, examining the spikes, which were about the size of a large lead-pencil, about three or four inches long, and barbed all along the sides, so that they looked not unlike rye beards under a microscope. These spikes are placed not at the end of the tail, but near the middle.
"Are sting rays good to eat?" asked Jack, examining the slimy, flabby creature.
"It all depends upon the taste of the eater," replied Ned. "The negroes sometimes eat the flaps or wings, and most white people on the coast have curiosity enough to taste them. They always say there's nothing bad about the taste, but I never knew anybody to take to sting rays as a delicacy. Some people say that alligator steaks are good, and a good many people eat sharks now and then. For my part good fish are too plentiful here for me to experiment with bad ones."
The fishing was resumed now, and it was not long before Jack confessed that the fish were beginning to "bother" him by their abundance and eagerness.
"Ned," he said, "I apologize. If you've any fiddlers about your clothes, I believe I'll confine my attention to sheephead; I'm tired of pulling fish in."
"Well, let's go ashore, then," said Ned, laughing, "and have dinner."
"Do fish bite in that way generally down here?" asked Charley.
"Yes, when the tide isn't too full. Fishing really gets to be a bore here, it is so easy to fill a boat; anybody can do that as easily as throw a cast net."
"Now hush that," said Charley. "Jack has owned up and apologized, and agreed that he knows more than he did this morning."