A man cannot walk in deepish water so quickly as a dog can swim, and so Viking seized him before he had gone many yards.
Do savages faint, I wonder? I never have seen one "go off", as old wives call it, and require smelling-salts and burned feathers. Nevertheless this fellow became insensible when Vike proceeded to shake him out of his skin.
So the dog towed him in.
Carrambo drew his knife, and would have killed him at once but for Duncan's interference.
"No, no," he shouted, "spare his life, Carrambo!"
Firing had never slackened, and now as the enemy gave way it was more rapid and deadly than ever. But in a few minutes' time there was not a savage left on the opposite bank. Only the dead, only the wounded tossing and writhing in agony in the moonlight.
There was still a chance, however, of the attack being renewed. For this reason: King Goo-goo had adopted a plan of his own for punishing those who were defeated in battle, and invariably the first half-dozen men who returned were clubbed to death. Goo-goo was rather partial to brain fritters, and cared very little whose brains contributed to this little entrée.
And now the march was resumed.
Sometimes the little band was so close to the forest that they could hear the howling and din of the gorillas, at other times they were stretching over arid tracts of a kind of prairie land. Nor were these silent and uninhabited. Beasts of the desert were leopards and even lions.
The former fled on sight, the latter did not dare to attack.