Again that eerie, inarticulate cry!
Disengaging one hand from the tree, the boy stretched it forth to the woman's breast, which, covered as it was with the clothes, had all the seeming of life and movement.
Joe was in the very act of removing a fold of the blanket, when suddenly, and without the slightest warning, there rose up into the lad's face an angry, hissing, venomous snake, the deadliest of its kind. Its beady eyes glittered; its forked tongue shot in and out with inconceivable rapidity; its sibilant hiss was accompanied with a musky odour, sickening in the extreme; its head and body for half its length were erect, and bent forward from the neck, vibrating and swaying in a rhythmic movement. The reptile was within striking distance. In another second that almost invisible death-stroke will be dealt; invisible, that is, by reason of its lightning-like speed.
But this deadly intention is defeated by an involuntary movement on Joe's part. This young man, for the briefest of brief moments, clung to the tree with a rigid grasp; eyes staring in amazement and terror, with mouth wide open in automatic gape. Any attempt to defend himself were useless in the most absolute sense of that term. In another tick, before he can move a hand, these poison fangs will be deep buried in his horror-stricken face, so temptingly near. The only hope for the lad lay in doing a disappearing trick. And this happened. Had it been premeditated, however swiftly, the time taken to make up his mind, and to telegraph the resolution formed in the brain to the nerve cells and muscles, would have been sufficient for the lightning stroke to fall.
What really happened was this: the apparition of the red-bellied, black snake simply petrified Joe. An awful, blood-curdling, hair-raising, galvanic shock of abject terror, contradictory as it may seem, paralysed the lad. Simultaneously with that he is falling through space, an inert mass, to be soused into the water with a splash that sent the spray flying over the boat's crew.
At the moment of the splash, Joe's mind, will, and nerve were restored to their normal activity. The instinct of self-preservation, so strong in all healthy natures, especially boys', did for the lad in an infinitesimal fraction of time as much and as effectively as though he had taken, say, half an hour to plan his procedure.
He had, however, in escaping Scylla fallen into Charybdis. As soon as Joe reached the water he made for the boat. Fortunately he did not fall into it, or this story might never have been told. He fell into the stream, some two or three yards away from the skiff. Quickly as he was carried down-stream he managed by violent efforts to reach the boat at the stern. Tom clutched him frantically by the shirt collar, enabling the swimmer to get his hands on the gunwale. Joe, thus helped, clambered into the boat or ever the boat's crew had recovered from their consternation.
"Oh, Moses!" exclaimed, or rather gasped, he, "that—was—a go. Whew!"
"My goodness! How'd yer come to fall kersplosh like that?"
"Why!" pointing up. "See! there's the beast. See him crawling out there?"