A NIGHT ALARM
Sleep comes and sleep goes, and always seems beyond our control. Sometimes the weary one drops off soundly the moment his head has been comfortably settled upon the pillow; at other times, however tired he may have been before going to bed, the very fact of having undressed has so thoroughly wakened him up that the object for which he has come to bed has been completely banished.
It was so with Harry Kenyon in some respects that night. He had not undressed, and he had not gone to bed, only made himself as comfortable as he could on a mat pillow two thwarts of the boat, using his hand as a pillow.
As comfortable as he could! but it was not very comfortable, for the bottom of the boat was as hard as the one quill which the Irishman put beneath him to try what sleeping on a feather-bed was like. There was too much light in the open cabin, and he could hear the ping-wing of mosquitoes above him in the roof.
He shut his eyes tightly, but every now and then he could see that his eyelids looked translucent. The water was making quite a loud, rushing noise against the sides of the boat, and the barkings, croakings, and indescribable noises from jungle and river-bank seemed to be increasing minute by minute.
Harry shifted his position a little, and then felt annoyed, for close at hand he could hear a steady, deep breathing which he knew was his father's, and from just beyond, another deep respiration with a faint buzz in it, which was evidently the doctor's breath coming and going through his big, thick, ruddy-brown moustache.
"Why can't I go to sleep like that?" muttered the lad. "I'm just as tired as they are, and yet I feel as if I were going to lie awake all night."
Harry uttered a sound very strongly resembling the grunt of one of the lower animals, and then resettled himself.
"Now I will go to sleep," he muttered.
But a quarter of an hour must have passed, and he was as wakeful as ever, while he was quite sure that he had heard the low, mournful cry of the tiger very near.