“Why, it looks as if a great cat had been here,” said Dick.
“Yes; great cat; lion!” said the Zulu.
And when Mr Rogers and Jack had cantered up, and seen the spoor, as such footprints were generally termed in South Africa, they knew that there would be real danger now hovering about their nightly camps.
That afternoon, as they were passing through a woody portion of the country, Chicory, who was well ahead, assegai in hand, eagerly looking out for game, was heard suddenly to yell out as if in agony; and as all ran to his help, he was found to be rolling on the ground, shrieking the native word for “Snake! snake!”
Mr Rogers was the first to reach him, being mounted, and as he drew rein by the prostrate boy, he saw a long thin snake gliding away.
He was just in time, and leaning forward he took rapid aim with his fowling-piece; and as the smoke rose, a long thin ash-coloured snake was seen writhing, mortally wounded, upon the ground.
The General caught the boy by the shoulder, and proceeded to divide his jet-black hair, examining his scalp carefully, but without finding any trace of a wound; though Chicory declared that he was killed, and that the snake had seized him by the head as he was going under a tree.
He had felt it, and when he threw himself forward to avoid it, the creature writhed and twisted about his neck, till in his horror he rolled over and over, partly crushing the reptile, which was making its escape when Mr Rogers’s gun put an end to its power of doing mischief.
The General having satisfied himself that his boy was not hurt, sent him forward with a cuff on the ear, before giving his master a grateful look for destroying a virulently poisonous serpent—one, he assured them, whose regular practice was to hang suspended by the tail from some low branch, and in this position to strike at any living creature that passed beneath.
“He would have been dead now,” said the General, “if the snake’s teeth had gone through his hair.”