It was but the simple obedience of instinct to leap to one side, which he did; but as ill luck would have it, hampered by the impedimenta carried in his arms, he came in violent collision with one of the stems of the banyan, which not only sent him back with a rebound, but threw him down upon the earth, flat on his face. He would have done better by lying still, for in that position the snake could not have coiled around and constricted him. And the python rarely takes to its teeth till it has tried its powers of squeezing.
But the ship-carpenter, ignorant of this
herpetological fact, and as an Irishman not highly gifted either with patience or prudence, after scrambling a while upon his hands and knees, stood once more upon his feet.
He had scarcely got into an erect attitude when his body was embraced by a series of spiral annulations that extended from head to foot—huge thick rings, slimy and clammy to the touch, which he knew to be the foldings of the python.
Had there been any Lanoons, or Dyak pirates, within a mile’s distance, they might have heard the cry that escaped him. The forest birds heard it afar off, and ceased their chatterings and warblings, so that there was no sound for some time save the continuous shrieks and ejaculations that came from Murtagh’s lips.
Captain Redwood, altogether unarmed, leaped back into the pinnace to seize the boat-hook, thinking it the best weapon for the occasion. It might have been of service if obtainable in time. But long before he could have returned with it the ship-carpenter’s ribs would have been compressed into a mass of broken bones, and the breath crushed out of his body.
This would certainly have been the lamentable result but for a weapon with which a Malay is always armed, carrying it on his body nearer than his shirt, and almost as near as his skin. It was the kris. As a matter of course, Saloo had one, and luckily for his old shipmate, “Multa,” he knew how to handle it with skill, so that, in driving its twisted blade through the python’s throat, he did not also impale upon its point the jugular vein of the Irishman. He did the one dexterously without doing the other, and the consequence was that the huge snake, suffering keenly from having its throat pierced through, quickly uncoiled itself from the body of its intended victim, glad to let the latter escape, and only thinking of getting free itself by scuttling off into the thickest of the underwood, where it disappeared evidently writhing in pain.
Too anxious about the condition of their comrade, neither Captain Redwood nor Saloo thought of pursuing it, but stooped down over the released body of the Irishman, who had fallen prostrate to the earth.
On due examination it proved that there was not much harm done beyond a terrible fright; and after some congratulations, he was induced to get once more upon his feet and accompany them to the camp. But for Saloo and his kris, beyond doubt he would never have returned to it alive.