Once more the girl vanished into the night.
Next evening, just after nightfall, three strange dories might have been seen stealing from the mouth of the creek. Behind them, wriggling and twisting with the ripple and flow of the water, came a serpent-like affair hundreds of feet in length. The dories came from the Carib sail boats. They were strongly manned by Carib crews.
Leaving the creek, they moved slowly up the river. When they had reached a point a mile above the mouth of the creek, they turned their prows toward shore. Once there, they tied the long trailer to a Yamra tree.
This accomplished, they paddled rapidly back to the spot where the other end of the trailer was bumping the shore. Having attached this end solidly to a group of overhanging trees, they returned again to the other end. After unfastening this end, aided by the current and their own sturdy rowing, they brought this end to the opposite bank. There they anchored it.
“The trap is set.” Pant said this with a sigh of relief. “The night is ideal. No moon. Clouds drifting over the stars. It will be very dark. If they come, their very fear of light will be their undoing.” At that he ordered his men to row him back to the other shore. There for some time he busied himself with the fastenings of that end of the “trap.”
“There!” he breathed. “A single stroke of the axe, and it is done.”
“They will come very late at night if they come at all,” he told his men. “Time for another thing. Doesn’t really matter whether I’m here or not. The trap will spring.”
He was eager to be away after the big cat whose tracks, freshly made the night before, had been seen in the mud of a small stream that crossed the trail to the river. At realization that he was so near, the Caribs had been thrown into panic. Some of them had been for manning their crafts and drifting down stream at once. But upon receiving Pant’s promise that within forty-eight hours the skin of the killer should be drying against the wall of the cook shack, they had gone back to work.
It was a rash promise, but Pant resolved that he would make good. So this night, armed only with his rifle and a common flashlight, he made his way over the river trail to a place of hiding he had prepared.
He had covered half the distance, when on pausing to listen, he caught the faint sound of footsteps on the moss covered trail.