"Asleep, Phra?"
No answer.
"Phra! the tiger's coming quite near."
This in a whisper, but there was no response, for Phra was sleeping soundly.
"Oh, how hot it is! I can't hardly breathe," muttered Harry; "and there are those wretched old Siamese snoring under the mat forward as if they were doing it on purpose to keep me awake.—Wish I could get up and go for a walk.—How stupid! It's mad enough to go for a walk when it's broad daylight. I know it's impossible, and yet I get wishing such an idiotic thing as that.—Might sit up and open the mat, though, and watch the fire-flies.
"What stuff," he said to himself the next moment; "who's going to sit up all night watching fire-flies dancing about like sparks in tinder? Besides, if I opened the matting it might give some of us cold and fever, and it would be all my fault. Oh, why can't I go to sleep! There never was such an unlucky fellow as I am."
He tried turning, but he could not get into a more comfortable position, and he turned back and listened to the splashings in the river coming nearer and going farther away. Once more he began to think of a huge serpent up in the tree swinging itself down, and a faint rustling in the thatch he was sure must be the great reptile's head as it kept on touching the palm leaf matting; and in imagination he saw the forked tongue flicking in and out of the nick in the upper jaw, till a loud tap told him that it was only a beetle inside instead of outside, and it had lost its hold and fallen to the bottom of the boat.
"That was all fancy," he said to himself; "but that rustling noise ashore is not. I believe it's some big animal searching about the camp."
Crack!
"There, I knew it. A buffalo, I believe, and it put its hoof on a dead stick."