“Jack! Jack! Come quick!”
The cry rang through the trees sharply. Jack’s heart gave a mighty bound. Tom’s shout was vibrant with terror. Could he have encountered a band of Indians? Some wild beast?
Dropping his pig, Jack saw to the mechanism of his rifle and plunged forward. The next instant he came to a standstill, literally petrified with horror.
Tom had stumbled over a root and had fallen prone. That much was evident. He was just scrambling to his feet as Jack came on the scene, but already he had perceived the same object that had caused Jack to stop short in his tracks with a sharp intake of his breath and a face that was white as ashes.
Looking upward the boy saw what at first appeared to be a supple highly-colored liana swinging and swaying from the upper branches of a fair-sized mango tree. But this “liana” as Jack had for an instant deemed it, he saw, at almost the same instant, was instinct with life!
Instead of the moving object being part of the tree, or a creeper dependent from it, its supple, cylindrical body and glittering scales showed it to be a monster serpent.
It was an anaconda, the giant boa-constrictor of the Brazilian forests, which has been known to attain the enormous length of forty feet. The monster hanging above Tom was of huge dimensions. At least fifteen feet of its scaly body hung from the tree. How much more was wrapped about the upper branches in sinuous coils, Jack could only guess.
As he gazed on Tom’s predicament his blood fairly congealed in his veins. He felt incapable of action. As if in a dream he saw Tom struggling to rise from the ground and escape the pendent terror above him. But as he moved Jack saw, to his horror, that the anaconda slowly loosened its upper coils and hung lower.
So swiftly, yet so insensibly did it manage its gliding movements, that Jack had hardly taken in the details of the alarming scene before him when the monstrous creature’s head had reached the level of the ground.
With its jaws agape and forked tongue darting, the reptile began slowly oscillating as if trying its range.