In fact the most dangerous and troublesome creatures we had to encounter on our journey down the river, excepting man, were the mosquitoes—which swarmed all along the river borders and pestered us with their bites—and an exceedingly small fish that seemed to be in myriads in parts of the stream, and to make up in absolute ferocity for their want of size. This savageness of nature was of course but their natural instinctive desire for food, but it was dangerous in the extreme, as I knew later on. Our experience was in this wise:—
It was one lovely afternoon when we were floating dreamily along between two of the most beautiful walls of verdure that we had seen. Many of the trees were gorgeous with blossoms, the consequence being that bright-winged beetles, painted butterflies, and humming-birds abounded.
My uncle was seated half asleep with the heat, and his gun across his knees, waiting for an opportunity to shoot some large bird that would be good for food; I was dipping in my paddle from time to time so as to keep the canoe’s head straight and away from the awkward snags that projected from the river here and there—the remains of trees that had been washed out of the bank by some flood—and I was thinking despondently about the loss of poor Tom.
Then my thoughts reverted to home and those I had to meet there, with our accounts of how it was that poor Tom had met his death.
“All due to my miserable ambition,” I said to myself; “all owing to my wretched thirst for gold. And what has it all come to?” I said bitterly. “I had far better have settled down to honest, straightforward labour. I should have been better off.”
I gave the paddle a few dips here, and noted that the water was much purer and clearer than it had seemed yet. We were very close in to the shore, but we had floated down so far that we had ceased to fear the Indians, believing as we did that they were now far behind.
Then I began to think once more of how much better off I should have been if I had settled down to work on my uncle’s plantation.
Not much, I was obliged to own, for my settling down would not have saved me from quarrelling with Garcia, neither would it have cleared my uncle from the incumbrance upon his home.
“Perhaps things are best as they are,” I said; and then I looked back to where Lilla was thoughtfully gazing down into the river from where she reclined upon the raft, and letting one of her hands hang down in the water, which she played with and splashed from time to time.
I was just going to warn her not to do so, for I remembered having read or heard tell that alligators would sometimes make a snap at a hand dragging in the water like that, when she uttered a sharp cry, snatching her hand away; and as she did so I saw a little flash, as if a tiny, silvery fish, dropped back into the water.