“See, Flint, I tire of this!” shouted the Marquis suddenly and imprudently. (I judge that he had heard it too, and it and other things had “got on his nerves,” as women say.) “Faint heart gathers no moss—here goes for France, my brave!” He made a dart at the jar and snatched off the lid.
Do you know what is the swiftest thing in the animal kingdom? Did you ever see a brown flash of lightning get up from the ground and strike?
I know, and I had seen just such a thing before. So I didn’t have to stop and think.... The Marquis got my punch fair in the chest; it doubled him up and sent him half across the house. My right hand being thus occupied, I hadn’t time to attend to my left and it got in the way. It was on the first joint of the third finger that the snake got me. He held on like a bulldog.
Now, I must have knocked the wind pretty well out of the Marquis, in throwing him out of the way as I did; but you never saw a man recover quicker. He was up on his feet before one would have time to tell of it. He had got a great steel clearing-knife down from the wall (evidently Mo did a bit of coastal trading) in two seconds or thereabouts, and had slashed the snake clean through before I got it shaken off. I pulled its head away then and threw it on the floor. I had had a look at it and saw that there was only one thing to do.
“Give me the knife,” I said. The Marquis gave it and, as I am alive, he was crying as he did.
There was nothing to make a fuss about. I had the top joint of the finger off in two clean chops. And there is no finger a man can spare better than the left-hand third.
I tied it up and put a sort of tourniquet on. Then I remembered the diamond—it was not so strange that I’d forgotten it for a minute or two, all things considered—and put my right hand into the jar that had lately held such an unpleasant occupant. I pulled out—not the diamond, but a bit of common stone tied up in a leaf.
The sorcerer had us again. No doubt he had palmed the jewel, somehow or other, when setting his trap.
I was feeling a bit sick, what with loss of blood and the small amount of poison that had got into circulation before I took the finger off. I was sure now that we had not a chance of getting the stone—as things were. Mo was thoroughly awake, and there was nothing for it but to retreat—for the present.
“Wait till I come back with an R. M. and a score of armed native constabulary, you heathen beast,” I said to myself. “Just wait. You’ve earned what you’ll get—richly earned it.”