The alligators, which had been cruising to and fro in an aimless sort of way, were now heading straight for his place of concealment. Had they scented him? Forty yards—thirty—twenty—he watched them with a horrible fascination. Then they both disappeared. Now was the time. Placing a foot in the nick he had cut in the clay bank, and with his left hand firmly grasping a bough overhead, Gerard drew himself up. By cautiously shifting his position, he gained a little more height, and thus hanging by the grip of his left hand, his body bent out over the water, in which he had stood up to his knees, Gerard awaited the attack of the formidable reptiles.
Chapter Nineteen.
Between Two Perils.
Nothing is so prone to defeat its own end as the fixed, overstrained attentiveness of intense expectation. The eye, riveted on one point, almost ceases to see it; the mind, dwelling on one person or object, confuses the idea of that person or object twenty times over. Thus Gerard Ridgeley, hanging there, staring down into the waters of the Black Umfolosi, momentarily expecting the swift stealthy rush, to behold the current darkened by the hideous shape of the huge lizard rising beneath him, soon lost the power of seeing almost anything at all, so intense was the strain upon his faculties of sight and hearing. Minutes were like aeons. His muscles seemed cracking. The terrible suspense seemed to tell upon him physically, to exhaust him. Then suddenly there rose out of the water a pair of great bony jaws, and closing with a vicious snap within half a yard of his body, sank back again out of sight as suddenly and noiselessly as they had appeared.
Appalling as this occurrence was, its effect was salutary. The presence of real and tangible danger broke the spell of his terrible suspense. Gerard was himself again now. So narrowly had the monster failed to seize him, that he had almost seemed to be looking into those hideous jaws with their saw-like and curved-back teeth, could distinguish the scales on the gaunt bony head, and mark the fiend-like expression in the beady cruel eye. Certainly the brute would come again, and this time it would be one or the other of them.
Grasping his impromptu bayonet, Gerard waited, cool and calm now, but every faculty on the alert. There was a ripple and a swirl on the water, showing that something was moving beneath; and so strange are the fancies that flash through our minds at critical times, that at that moment Gerard remembered how often he had marked that same ripple and swirl, though on a smaller scale, where some big trout was on the feed, and had stolen down to throw in his cast. Now he himself was being “risen.”
Again came that bubbling swirl, and now again that grisly head rose up. And, as it did so, Gerard, with all the strength of his arm struck the blade of the knife right down into the reptile’s eye. In it went, nearly to the hilt. The blood spurted forth in a great jet, and the strong, thick-backed knife-blade snapped like a bit of rotten stick, as the stricken monster wrenched himself round, and, with a convulsive plunge, sank out of sight.
It was all done in a moment—so suddenly, so quickly, that Gerard could at first hardly believe it had actually happened, but for the deep streak of blood upon the surface and the seething bubbles where the water was lashed into spume by the frantic blow of the monster’s tail. But as he realised that he had defeated and probably slain his formidable enemy, a feeling of elation set in, which, however, was not destined to last. True, he had slain one alligator, but then there were two. Would not the other attack him next, even if the blood did not attract yet more of them? He could not go on killing alligators in this fashion all day; besides, his cleverly devised bayonet was snapped and useless. Not altogether, though. There was still enough left of the knife-blade to make a sufficiently serviceable weapon if planted straight in the eye as before.