“Mind where ye sit doone, lad,” he observes to Angland, through clenched teeth, which hold a grimy old maize-cob pipe; “this hill is just the very place for snakes.”
The words are hardly uttered, when the black boy, who is standing behind the white men, suddenly ejaculates a guttural exclamation, and dashes his nulla nulla (a three-foot club of heavy wood) down upon a small branch-like object, lying on a ledge of rock close to where Claude’s feet are resting.
“A cussed death-adder, by all that’s blue!” exclaims Williams, as both men start up, and bending over the cliff observe a little light-brown serpent that is writhing on the rocks below.
“A narrer squeak you’ve had of it, my son,” the old miner observes, wiping his brow with the back of his hairy hand. “If you’d happened to move your foot, it would have been a case of death in less than twenty minutes. There ain’t no cure for their bite.”
General Gordon, acting under orders from the elder white man, now fetches the snake from where his well-directed shot had thrown it, and Claude shudders slightly as Williams, pointing to the crushed remains of the dangerous reptile,—which is only about two feet in length,—proceeds to direct his friend’s attention to a curious horn-like projection which sticks out from the tail end of the hideous, slug-like body.
“Some say that this ’ere’s got a poison fang in it, but I don’t believe it,” the old miner observes. “It’s against Nature for the warmint to have a sting at each end. It can do all’s fair with the fangs it’s got at its business end, I take it.”
Claude nods his acquiescence.
“This ’ere horn is just for helping the devils to jump. They move when they’re skeered jest like them yellow grubs in a cheese. And I believe they use this prong to catch hold of, just like this.”
The speaker, to exemplify his meaning, takes a springy stem of dry grass between his finger and thumb, and, bending the two ends towards each other, allows the fragments to fly off into the air.
The black boy, who has been watching this object lesson in ophiology, roars with delight at the ingenious method Williams has employed to explain the snake’s mode of progression.