“My brave fellow, don’t be imprudent! It is too great a risk. Let us stay here till morning. Night will bring a change, and the reptile will go off.”
“Patron! the Mundurucú thinks differently. That jacaré is a man-eater, strayed from some of the villages, perhaps Coary, that we have lately left. It has tasted man’s blood,—even ours, that of your son, your own. It sees men in the tree. It will not retire till it has gratified its ravenous desires. We may stay in this tree till we starve, and from feebleness drop, one by one, from the branches.”
“Let us try it for one night?”
“No, patron,” responded the Indian, his eyes kindling with a revengeful fire, “not for one hour. The Mundurucú was willing to obey you in what related to the duty for which you hired him. He is no longer a tapuyo. The galatea is lost, the contract is at an end, and now he is free to do what he may please with his life. Patron!” continued the old man, with an energy that resembled returning youth, “my tribe would spurn me from the malocca if I bore it any longer. Either I or the jacaré must die!”
Silenced by the singularity of the Indian’s sentiment and speech, Trevannion forbore further opposition. No one knew exactly what his purpose was, though his attitude and actions led all to believe that he meant to attack the jacaré. With his knife? No. He had negatived this question himself. How then? There appeared to be no other weapon within reach. But there was, and his companions soon saw there was, as they sat silently watching his movements. The knife was only used as the means of procuring that weapon, which soon made its appearance in the form of a macana, or club, cut from one of the llianas,—a bauhinia of heaviest wood, shaped something after the fashion of a “life-preserver,” with a heavy knob of the creeper forming its head, and a shank about two feet long, tapering towards the handle. Armed with this weapon, and restoring the knife to his tango, the Indian came down and glided out along the horizontal limb already known to our story. To attract the reptile thither was not difficult. His presence would have been a sufficient lure, but some broken twigs cast upon the water served to hasten its approach to the spot. In confidence the jacaré came on, believing that by some imprudence, or misadventure, at least one of those it had marked for its victims was about to drop into its hungry maw. One did drop,—not into its maw, or its jaws, but upon its back, close up to the swell of its shoulders. Looking down from the tree, his companions saw the Mundurucú astride upon the alligator, with one hand, the left, apparently inserted into the hollow socket of the reptile’s eye, the other raised aloft, grasping the macana, that threatened to descend upon the skull of the jacaré. It did descend,—crack!—crash!—crackle! After that there was not much to record. The Mundurucú was compelled to slide off his seat. The huge saurian, with its fractured skull, yielded to a simple physical law, turned over, showing its belly of yellowish white,—an aspect not a whit more lovely than that presented in its dark dorsal posterior. If not dead, there could be no doubt that the jacaré was no longer dangerous; and as its conqueror returned to the tree, he was received with a storm of “Vivas” to which Tipperary Tom added his enthusiastic Irish “Hoor-raa!”
Chapter Thirty Two.
Taking to the Water.
The Mundurucú merited congratulation, and his companions could not restrain their admiration and wonder. They knew that the alligator was only assailable by ordinary weapons—as gun, spear, or harpoon—in three places; in the throat, unprotected, except by a thin, soft integument; in the hollow in front of the shoulders, and immediately behind the bony socket of the eyes; and in the eyes themselves,—the latter being the most vulnerable of all. Why had the Indian, armed with a knife, not chosen one of these three places to inflict a mortal cut or stab?