But the boy held on desperately, and the raft righted itself.
Again the brute returned to the attack. This time it flung its body half upon the raft and its jaws snapped within an inch of the lad’s legs.
There was a heavy paddle lying on the raft. Bomba snatched it up and brought it down with all his force on the cayman’s snout.
The brute winced, but still continued its efforts to climb up on the frail structure. Then Bomba jammed the stick through the gaping jaws deep into the brute’s throat.
There was a grunt of pain and rage, and the cayman fell back into the water that was speedily dyed with the blood that came from the wound. There was no more fight left in the creature. It swam around for a moment, glaring with its malignant eyes at the human banquet it had counted on, and then sank slowly from sight.
Bomba had won. But it had been a terrific experience. He sat down on the raft, too utterly worn out for the moment to move a finger.
But if his body was exhausted, his mind was still active. The same subjects that had tormented him a few minutes ago in his dreadful extremity now appeared in a roseate glow.
The white men! He would see them again. Or if not Gillis and Dorn, others of their kind. His kind, too, he thought with a thrill of exultation.
As he lay there, his brown body glistening with river water might have belonged to any native Amazonian. His sturdy body and rippling muscles, too, might have been those of a caboclo, a native waterman.
But not his eyes. The dreaming look that now clouded their bright watchfulness was a heritage of white men—the striving of a soul for ascendency over mere physical things, the yearning for something higher than an animal existence.