“We’ll try not,” said Panton; and after the men had neatly coiled up the lines, they went back with the mate, all but Billy Wriggs, who offered to stop and help skin the snakes.
“You don’t mean it, do you, Billy?” whispered Smith. “Thought you was too skeered?”
“So I am, mate; but I want to be long o’ you to see their games. It’s unnatural like to be doin’ dooty aboard a wessel as ain’t in the water.”
“But you won’t touch one of they sarpents?”
“Well, I don’t want to, mate; but it’s all in yer day’s work, yer know. I thought you said it was only one in two halves?”
“So I did, mate—so I did—and so it ought to ha’ been, ’cording to my ideas, and the way I let go at it with a haxe. But there, one never knows, and it was in the dark now, warn’t it?”
“Seventeen feet, five inches,” said Oliver, just then, as he wound up his measuring tape, “and sixteen feet, four—extreme lengths,” as Panton entered the sizes in Oliver’s notebook for him.
“Hark at that now!” said Billy Wriggs in a hoarse whisper. “Why, I should ha’ said as they was a hundred foot long apiece at least.”
“And, arter all, they ain’t much bigger than a couple o’ worms.”
Five minutes later the two men were hard at work skinning the reptiles; the example set by Oliver in handling them shaming both into mastering the repugnance they felt, and first one skin and then the other was stretched over the limb of a tree to dry; while the bodies were dragged to the cavernous chasm, and tossed down “to cook,” as Smith put it.