A DANGEROUS VISITOR.
It was not alone necessary for the plans of Ab and Oak that there should be made a deep hole in the ground. It was quite as essential for their purposes that the earth removed should not be visible upon the adjacent surface. The location of the pit, as has been explained, was some yards to the northeast of the tree in which the lookout had been made. A few yards southwest of the tree was a slight declivity and damp hollow, for from that point the land sloped, in a reed-grown marsh toward the river. It was decided to throw into this marsh all the excavated soil, and so, when Ab had outlined the pit and cut up its surface into sods, he carried them one by one to the bank and cast them down among the reeds where the water still made little puddles. In time of flood the river spread out into a lake, reaching even as far as here. The sod removed, there was exposed a rectangle of black soil, for the earth was of alluvial deposit and easy of digging. Shellful after shellful of the dirt did Ab carry from where the pit was to be, trotting patiently back and forth, but the work was wearisome and there was a great waste of energy. It was Oak who gave an inspiration.
"We must carry more at a time," he called out. And then he tossed down to Ab a wolfskin which had been given him by his father as a protection on cold nights and which he had brought along, tied about his waist, quite incidentally, for, ordinarily, these boys wore no clothing in warm weather. Clothing, in the cave time, appertained only to manhood and womanhood, save in winter. But Oak had brought the skin along because he had noticed a vast acorn crop upon his way to and from the rendezvous and had in mind to carry back to his own home cave some of the nuts. The pelt was now to serve an immediately useful purpose.
Spreading the skin upon the grass beside him, Ab heaped it with the dirt until there had accumulated as much as he could carry, when, gathering the corners together, he struggled with the enclosed load manfully to the bank and spilled it down into the morass. The digging went on rapidly until Ab, out of breath and tired, threw down the skin and climbed into the treetop and became the watchman, while Oak assumed his labor. So they worked alternately in treetop and upon the ground until the sun's rays shot red and slanting from the west. Wiser than to linger until dusk had too far deepened were these youngsters of the period. The clamshells were left in the pit. The lookout above declared nothing in sight, then slid to the ground and joined his friend, and another dash was made to the hill and the safety of its treetops. It was in great spirits that the boys separated to seek their respective homes. They felt that they were personages of consequence. They had no doubt of the success of the enterprise in which they had embarked, and the next day found them together again at an early hour, when the digging was enthusiastically resumed. Many a load of dirt was carried on the second day from the pit to the marsh's edge, and only once did the lookout have occasion to suggest to his working companion that he had better climb the tree. A movement in the high grass some hundred yards away had aroused suspicion; some wild animal had passed, but, whatever it was, it did not approach the clump of trees and work was resumed at once. When dusk came the moist black soil found in the pit had all been carried away and the boys had reached, to their intense disgust, a stratum of hard packed gravel. That meant infinitely more difficult work for them and the use of some new utensil.
There was nothing daunting in the new problem. When it came to the mere matter of securing a tool for digging the hard gravel, both Ab and Oak were easily at home. The cave dwellers, haunting the river side for centuries, had learned how to deal with gravel, and when Ab returned to the scene the next day he brought with him a sturdy oaken stave some six feet in length, sharpened to a point and hardened in the fire until it was almost iron-like in its quality. Plunged into the gravel as far as the force of a blow could drive it, and pulled backward with the leverage obtained, the gravel was loosened and pried upward either in masses which could be lifted out entire, or so crumbled that it could be easily dished out with the clamshell. The work went on more slowly, but not less steadily nor hopefully than on the days preceding, and, for some time, was uninterrupted by any striking incident. The boys were becoming buoyant. They decided that the grassy valley was almost uninfested by things dangerous. They became reckless sometimes, and would work in the pit together. As a rule, though, they were cautious--this was an inherent and necessary quality of a cave being--and it was well for them that it was so, for when an emergency came only one of them was in the pit, while the other was aloft in the lookout and alert.
It was about three o'clock one afternoon when Ab, whose turn it chanced to be, was working valiantly in the pit, while Oak, all eyes, was perched aloft. Suddenly there came from the treetop a yell which was no boyish expression of exuberance of spirits. It was something which made Ab leap from the excavation as he heard it and reach the side of Oak as the latter came literally tumbling down the bole of the tree of watching.
"Run!" Oak said, and the two darted across the valley and reached the forest and clambered into safe hiding among the clustering branches. Then, in the intervals between his gasping breath, Oak managed to again articulate a word:
"Look!" he said.
Ab looked and, in an instant, realized how wise had been Oak's alarming cry and how well it was for them that they were so distant from the clump of trees so near the river. What he saw was that which would have made the boys' fathers flee as swiftly had they been in their children's place. Yet what Ab looked upon was only a waving, in sinuous regularity, of the rushes between the tree clump and the river and the lifting of a head some ten or fifteen feet above the reed-tops. What had so alarmed the boys was what would have disturbed a whole tribe of their kinsmen, even though they had chanced to be assembled, armed to the teeth with such weapons as they then possessed. What they saw was not of the common. Very rarely indeed, along the Thames, had occurred such an invasion. The father of Oak had never seen the thing at all, and the father of Ab had seen it but once, and that many years before. It was the great serpent of the seas!
Safely concealed in the branches of a tree overlooking the little valley, the boys soon recovered their normal breathing capacity and were able to converse again. Not more than a couple of minutes, at the utmost, had passed between their departure from their place of labor and their establishment in this same tree. The creature which had so alarmed them was still gliding swiftly across the morass between the lowland and the river. It came forward through the marsh undeviatingly toward the tree clump, the tall reeds quivering as it passed, but its approach indicated by no sound or other token of disturbance. The slight bank reached, there was uplifted a great serpent head, and then, without hesitation, the monster swept forward to the trees and soon hung dangling from the branches of the largest one, its great coils twined loosely about trunk and limb, its head swinging gently back and forth just below the lower branch. It was a serpent at least sixty feet in length, and two feet or more in breadth at its huge middle. It was queerly but not brilliantly spotted, and its head was very nearly that of the anaconda of to-day. Already the sea-serpent had become amphibious. It had already acquired the knowledge it has transmitted to the anaconda, that it might leave the stream, and, from some vantage point upon the shore, find more surely a victim than in the waters of the sea or river. This monster serpent was but waiting for the advent of any land animal, save perhaps those so great as the mammoth or the great elk, or, possibly, even the cave bear or the cave tiger. The mammoth was, of course, an impossibility, even to the sea-serpent. The elk, with its size and vast antlers, was, to put it at the mildest, a perplexing thing to swallow. The rhinoceros was dangerous, and as for the cave bear and the cave tiger, they were uncomfortable customers for anything alive. But there were the cattle, the aurochs and the urus, and the little horses and deer, and wild hog and a score of other creatures which, in the estimation of the sea-serpent, were extremely edible. A tidbit to the serpent was a man, but he did not get one in half a century.
Not long did the boys remain even in a harborage so distant. Each fled homeward with his story.