The female lifted her head at the cry and tried to regain her feet, but was not strong enough to do so. With a turn of her pretty head in the direction of her mate, she fell back dead.
“It’s almost a shame,” Peter said.
“You wouldn’t be so sorry for the cats if they had got a claw into you,” Jimmie observed. “Just one claw in the flesh and it would have been all off.”
Peter turned away from the dead animals.
“Come on,” he said, “it seems like a slaughter house here.”
“Wait,” Jimmie cried. “I want to swing the cats up so they won’t be devoured by their friends of the jungle. I want the skins for rugs. Guess they will look pretty poor in our patrol room. What?”
“I’ll come back with you in the daylight,” Peter said, “if you’ll come away now.”
Leaving the glade where they had encountered such dangers, the boys moved toward the canal line, keeping the moon, now well toward the horizon, at their back.
“If we had done this before,” Jimmie said, as they forced their way through clusters of clinging vines, “we would be at home in bed now.”
“But we wouldn’t have had the jaguar rugs coming to us,” answered Peter. “Glad I didn’t think of it before.”