“Hurry! Hurry!” begged the man on the mast of the lighter. “One big gray-bearded monkey is getting ready to shin up after me, and there’s a twenty-foot snake wiggling this way from the after hatch. Hurry!”
Andy paused in the operation of lowering the boat.
“Say, we’re going to be up against it ourselves if we board that lighter,” he said to Frank.
“I know it, but I don’t intend to board her until I get those creatures out of our way.”
“But how you going to do it?” his brother wanted to know.
“I’ll make some plan after we row over and talk to the man. It’s queer how he happened to have such a cargo, and how they got loose. Lower away.”
The little craft took the water easily and was soon riding under the stern of the Gull. Frank and Andy slid down the rope falls, after tossing two pairs of oars into the boat, and unhooked the blocks, leaving them dangling to be used on their return to hoist the boat up to the davits again.
“We’re coming!” yelled Frank, in answer to another frantic appeal for aid. “How many of them are there?”
“About a million snakes and ten thousand monkeys!” was the frightened reply. “Come on! I can’t hang here much longer.”
“Where did they come from?” demanded Andy, when he and his brother were near the side of the lighter.