“Steady there with that gun,” said a low familiar voice. “Don’t shoot.”
“Shaddy!” panted Rob.
“Me it is, lad. I crep’ along so as not to disturb Mr Brazier. I say, did you hear that roar in the water?—but o’ course you did. Know what it was?”
“No!” cried both boys in a breath. “Some great kind of amphibious thing,” added Rob.
“’Phibious thing!—no. I couldn’t see it, but there was no doubt about it: that threshing with the tail told me.”
“Yes, we heard its tail beating,” said Joe quickly. “What was it?”
“What was them, you mean! Well, I’ll tell you. One of them tapir things must have been wading about in a shallow of mud, and a great ’gator got hold of him, and once he’d got hold he wouldn’t let go, but hung on to the poor brute and kept on trying to drag him under water. Horrid things, ’gators. I should like to shoot the lot.”
Rob drew a long breath very like a sigh. An alligator trying to drag down one of the ugly, old-world creatures that looks like a pig which has made up its mind to grow into an elephant, and failed—like the frog in the fable, only without going quite so far—after getting its upper lip sufficiently elongated to do some of the work performed by an elephant’s trunk! One of these jungle swamp pachyderms and a reptile engaged in a struggle in the river, and not some terrible water-dragon with a serpentlike tail such as Rob’s imagination had built up with the help of pictures of fossil animals and impossible objects from heraldry! It took all nervousness and mystery out of the affair, and made Rob feel annoyed that he had allowed his imagination to run riot and create such an alarming scene.
“Getting towards morning, isn’t it?” said Joe hastily, and in a tone which told of his annoyance, too, that he also should have participated in the scare.
“Getting that way, lad, I s’pose. I ain’t quite doo to relieve the watch, but I woke up and got thinking a deal about our job to-morrow, and that made me wakeful. And then there was that splashing and bellowing in the water, and I thought Mr Rob here would be a bit puzzled to know what it was. Course I knew he wouldn’t be frightened.”