Already he was seized by the pangs of remorse.
Once more he looked at Frank, and once more those staring eyes turned his blood to ice water.
Then, uttering shriek after shriek, Gage turned and fled through the swamp, plunging through marshy places and jungles, falling, scrambling up, leaping, staggering, gasping for breath, feeling those staring eyes at his back, feeling that they would pursue him to his doom.
Scarcely less agitated and overcome, Bowsprit and the negro followed, and Frank Merriwell was abandoned to his fate.
Frank longed for the use of his hands to tear away those fiendish vines. It was a horrible thing to stand and let them creep up, up, up, till they encircled his throat and strangled him to death.
Through his mind flashed a picture of himself as he would stand there with the vines drawing tighter and tighter about his throat and his face growing blacker and blacker, his tongue hanging out, his eyes starting from their sockets.
He came near shrieking for help, but the thought that the cry must reach the ears of Leslie Gage kept it back, enabled him to choke it down.
He had declared that Gage should not hear him beg for mercy or aid. Not even the serpent vine and all its horrors could make him forget that vow.
The little red flowers were getting nearer and nearer to his face, and they were fluttering with eagerness. He felt a sucking, drawing, stinging sensation on one of his wrists, and he believed one of those fiendish vampire mouths had fastened there.
He swayed his body, he tried to move his feet, but he seemed rooted to the ground. He did not have the strength to drag himself from that fatal spot and from the grasp of the vine.