The Cosmic Courtship

by Julian Hawthorne

But he was confronted by the impenetrable face of the rock, with not a crack in it large enough to admit the point of his crutch. Miracles did not perplex Jim, but they sometimes annoyed him. After eying the rock disgustedly for a few moments, he hit the great cliff a reproving tap, and retired to a small boulder hard by and sat down upon it. If the persons in whom he was interested came out by the same way that they had gone in, he would be on hand to receive them. Meanwhile, as his dessert had been interrupted by Zarga’s arrival, he took one of the apples from his pocket and began to munch it appreciatively and philosophically. “Dat kid ain’t straight, but she puts up a good feed,” was his judgement.

Before the apple had been half consumed, a plashing noise from the direction of the lake caused him to look around. Had he been Achilles or Alexander the Great, instead of a one-legged New York newsboy, the sight that met his eyes might have alarmed him. As it was, he was merely filled with a wary but delighted curiosity.

Jim had once upon a time visited the Museum of Natural History in New York, and had there, in a large saloon, beheld a plaster model of an amphibious animal which had lived, wallowed, and devoured eight million years ago. It was seventy-five feet long, twenty-five feet at the shoulder, and displayed the scaly terrors of a tail which was only less fearsome than its neck and head. Jim wished at that time that he had been born soon enough to have pursued the original of this model with a repeating-rifle and a snickersnee.

Here, now, was the animated and active grandfather of the comparatively trivial and pygmy reptile which had been revealed to him in New York. It was so big that it might have entered the category of geologic phenomena, and held its own against a range of hills. The girth of its forelegs was as that of a giant sycamore in a Southern swamp; the row of ridges down its back might have served as a fence against a Hun invasion; its jaws yawned as wide as the portals of the church of Saint John the Divine in New York; each one of its double row of several hundred teeth was as tall as a drum-major and as sharp as the blade of a Louisiana colonel’s bowie; its tail was for the most part veiled by the lake, but the end of it was stirring up whirlpools as far out in the water as a second basemen could fling a ball. The whole creature was advancing upon Jim with the gladness of a familiar friend; and though its gait was leisurely, it was able to cover an acre of ground at a stride.

It did not occur to the boy at first that the apparition was meant especially for him; any more than he would have regarded the annual procession of the New York police-force up Fifth Avenue as having been organized with an eye to his capture. The disproportion was too preposterous. Of what consequence could he be to it? A mosquito might as reasonably have looked upon itself as an adequate meal for a crocodile. But it did not take him long to modify this view. There was no viand other than himself in sight, and he had seen a lizard engulf an ant with apparent pleasure. He must stand upon his defense!

The most feasible plan that occurred to him on the spur of the moment—a spur, in this case, of exceptional urgency—was to take a sprint along the animal’s tongue and reach the comparative safety of its gullet before it could bring its teeth to bear upon him. But he was handicapped by his one-leggedness; nor, should he win to the interior, had he so much as a pen-knife to chop his way out again. Running away would be equally vain; and to side-step the charge of a creature with such a tail was to invite disaster. The two or three seconds which he devoted to these reflections had sufficed to bring his antagonist so near that the next waddle would be the final one, so far as Jim was concerned.

Jim stood up, supporting himself against the boulder, and holding his crutch at arm’s-length vertically before him. The crutch was a stout bit of blackthorn, and sharp at one end. If he could contrive to thrust the crutch between the animal’s jaws at the moment they closed upon him, it might happen to pierce the roof of its mouth, and the prick thus administered might give him a chance to slip out before being crushed to a pulp. The stratagem did not promise very well, but it was the best he could do.

“It’s a good job the boss ain’t here!” was Jim’s last thought. He looked down a glutinous abyss which seemed to extend to the bottomless pit itself. “Come on, old sockdolager!” he shouted.

A slender shaft, arrowlike, and bright as lightening, flashed before his sight and struck the stupendous snake-lizard fair in the eyeball. There it stood, buried to half its depth, quivering. With such a missile did Olympian Jove quell the revolt of the Titans.

The effect was not to be compassed by mortal senses. Jim was blown backward by the foul expulsion of the creature’s breath, executing involuntary catherine-wheels over a space of a dozen yards. He picked himself up to witness a convulsion in which earthquake, tornado, and waterspout seemed to outdo their utmost. It was accompanied by a scream which made the roar of a volcano seem to Jim’s ears like the whistle of a boy’s pipe. As the creature flounced and flung its hideous length, the waters of the lake fled away, the solid earth groaned and was riven into crevasses, and a boulder as big as a bungalow, caught in the coil of its tail, was flung upward till it looked no larger than a pebble, and when it fell again it was splintered into gravel.