Hearing a sound in a tree at his left, he turned to see a native frantically struggling up the trunk in an endeavor to reach the lowest branch.
“The whole bunch has gone mad,” he told himself.
Then, of a sudden his eyes fell upon his quiver of arrows lying on the ground. With an instinct of preservation harking back perhaps to those remote days when his ancestors dressed in skins and lived by hunting with the longbow, he reached first for his quiver, then his bow.
As he reached for the bow, he caught sight of a pair of brown heels speeding down the trail.
Instinctively he turned to look in the opposite direction. That instant his blood froze.
Charging straight at him was a creature terrible to look upon. Curling yellow tusks six inches long, jaws that chopped at every bouncing step, a wild boar of the wilderness, savage, mad with rage, red-eyed and terrible, had come tearing out of the jungle.
One instant Johnny stood there paralyzed, the next, with such automatic precision as only comes from endless hours of training, his splendid hands did his bidding.
An arrow flashed into place, the bow string sang taut, the arrow sped to strike with a dull spat. The mad beast turning half about uttered a low grunting roar. The second arrow sped. The wild boar, rearing high and lunging far, fell at the boy’s feet, dead.
For a moment Johnny stood there motionless. The whole affair had been thrust upon him so suddenly that he had been able to form no plan of action, nor indeed to comprehend the meaning of it all.
“No rifles,” he told himself at last, thinking of the natives.