They moved about among the reeds and bushes, but could see nothing.
“I know what it is,” said Jack, laughing. “It’s some kind of big frog or toad: they live in such marshy places as this, and they croak and make noises that seem to be ever so far-off, when they are close by.”
“Oh! Look, Jack! Oh, poor thing!” cried his brother.
“Where? Where?”
“Over yonder, across the water.”
Jack caught sight of the objects that had taken his brother’s attention, and for a few moments the boys seemed passive spectators of the horrible scene.
Across the lagoon, and some fifty yards away, a beautiful antelope, with gracefully curved spiral horns, had apparently come out of the bushes to drink, at a point of land running a little way into the lake, when it had been seized by a hideous-looking crocodile. The monster’s teeth-armed jaws had closed upon the unfortunate antelope’s muzzle, and a furious struggle was going on, during which, as it uttered its piteous feeble lowing noise, something between the cry of a calf and a sheep, the crocodile, whose tail was in the water on the side of the point farthest from where the spectators stood, was striving to drag its prey into the lagoon.
The antelope made a brave struggle, but the tremendous grip of the reptile and its enormous weight, rendered the efforts of the poor beast vain: and as the boys gazed across, they saw the poor brute dragged down upon its knees and chest, and the crocodile shuffling slowly back into the water, an inch at a time.
“Oh, the poor, poor beast!” cried Dick piteously. “Oh, Jack, how dreadful!”