“Step back quietly. I’ll take care of this.”
Again the sharp reports, this time three—in rapid succession. But they were not from any firearm: they proceeded from a remarkably well plaited and well wielded raw-hide whip.
All unperceived a horseman had entered the open glade. Upon him the infuriated reptile now turned—which was precisely what he wanted to happen.
Backing his steed, a process to which that intelligent quadruped was by no means averse, he faced the great snake, firing a succession of whip cracks at it.
“Now run,” he called out. “I’ll draw the brute on.”
But he had reckoned without the innate ferocity of the said brute, for now uttering a fiendish hiss, it hurled itself straight at horse and rider. Nearly the whole of its huge length seemed to rise from the ground in that tremendous leap. The horse instinctively reared itself up on its hind legs, receiving the deadly fangs full in the chest, then whirling round, fell—fell right on to the writhing monster. And the rider?
With rare readiness of nerve and judgment the latter had slid from the saddle at exactly the right fraction of a moment, and now stood contemplating a furious convulsive intermingling of kicking hoofs and heaving coils. One deft slash of the raw-hide whip was capable of cutting the head off the terrible reptile, if only he could get it in. Then he suddenly grasped the fact that there was no need to do anything further at all. Though still squirming hideously the monster was dead. We have said that the horse, in falling, had come right down upon the reptile, and now it was found that the iron pommel of the saddle had snapped its vertebrae. The destroyed had in turn become the destroyer. It had avenged itself.
Its owner, however, gave it no thought just then. He turned to the girl. She was standing, with a large stone poised in her hand, a look of desperate resolution in her eyes. The man, for his part, decided that here was a picture he should never forget; the erect stateliness of the pose: the expression: the sublimity of a great resolution which had crushed down terror. She was magnificent, he told himself—lovely too.
“Why didn’t you make yourself scarce while you could?” he said. “I told you to, you know.”
“I wanted to see if I could be of some use,” she answered, dropping the stone which she had instinctively picked up as being the only approximate form of weapon at hand. “I should certainly have been killed if it hadn’t been for you. And the wonder is you weren’t. But your horse—I suppose there’s no chance for him?”