"He'll do all right now. Give me a drink, and have this mess cleared up," Nicholson said gruffly.
"How did you do it?" I asked him.
"Feel that," he answered, and with a blood-stained finger and thumb pinched the end of one of my fingers.
I winced—he might have had hold of me with pincers.
I shouted for Percy, and sang out for Moore to send up a couple of hands, and whilst Nicholson kept an eye on his patient my chum told me what had happened.
"He took up his knife. I set my teeth; but just as I thought he was going to use it he dropped it, and before I could wink an eyelash he'd nipped the jaws of the snake—just as he nipped your finger—bent four inches of its neck right away from the arm and, with the fingers of the other hand, swept round under the coils and unwound it. For a moment or two he held it in the air, the jaws in between his finger and thumb, the body coiling and twisting—I could hardly breathe—then he threw it away where you saw it, and it lashed about like a live thing. It's done now; what danger there was is over. Won't he be thankful?"
"We'll tell him directly he's round," I said. "My country, won't he be pleased! He'll be a new man."
Nicholson, coming out of the cabin, sang out: "No, you won't, unless you want to kill him. He's bad enough now, and he'll fancy the swelling is due to poison, whatever we tell him. He must not know until he's well again. As many people die of sheer fright, after being bitten, as from the poison itself."
"Is that why you coiled the signal halyard round the groove?" we both asked excitedly.
"Of course it was. He'll feel it under the bandage and think the snake's still there. I sewed the bandage so that he couldn't take it off to make certain. Don't you tell him till I give the word."