Lathrop looked alarmed.
"Say, Billy," he whispered as they moved forward, "I don't mind a little danger, but going up against an elephant with a few tin spears looks to me like being little above the limit."
"Cheer up," replied the irrepressible reporter, "we've got to go on now. It would never do for us to show the white feather at this stage of the game. The tribe would regard us as miserable cowards and perhaps even put us to death."
So with faces that one at least of them had some difficulty to render' expressive of calm repose the two American boys marched along with the others. As they advanced the drumming grew louder and they could feel the earth shake as the ponderous beast that caused it went through his strange exercise.
The leader worked round till the party was advancing against the wind, as elephants have a keen scent, and had they traveled along down the wind he would have been sure to have taken alarm and dashed off only to return and do more damage later on. In this way the party was enabled to work up to within a few yards of the great beast without his having any warning of their approach. It was a strange sight they beheld as they stood on the edge of the little clearing where the great beast was going through his dance. With his trunk curled high above his great head the big pachyderm was solemnly twirling round and round in a sort of slow waltz and every time he brought a foot down it was with a crash that shook the forest about him. He was a ferocious looking brute, with a wicked gleam in his small eye that boded ill for anyone who should happen to get in his path. One of his tusks was broken off short, doubtless in some fight with another of his kind, and his body was plowed with scars and cuts—the relics of former battles. Altogether he was as wicked and menacing a looking brute as the boys had ever seen.
Suddenly he sighted the attacking party. The dance instantly stopped and he stood stock-still for an instant gazing at them while they promptly made for the trees and clambered up them by means of the lanyards of creepers that swung down from the tops.
Billy and Lathrop, however, were too much astonished by the sudden turn events had taken to follow the example of the savages and so stood gazing awestricken at the elephant while he gazed at them in apparent amazement at two boys having the temerity to face him in his native forest.
The situation was not to last long, however. Their guide, with the rest of the party, had hastily clambered into the trees and now he called to the boys loudly:
"Climb! climb!"
But the churns were too late.