"Soon!" he shouted.
But Skag was at his heels and Cadman followed close, the short firing-piece in his hands.
The paths were narrow, the bamboo dense; the boy leaped into a curve and was lost. They raced after him, till the path broadened at the top of an elevation. Pausing an instant to listen, they saw—directly in front of them a little way distant—a tall post; a dark post, seven or eight feet above the bamboo tops, stiff and straight.
It held their eyes by its strange sheen. It began to lean stiffly toward one side—as if falling. It straightened and leaned the other way. Then undulation crept into it, till the top-end followed the outline of a double loop—like a figure-of-eight.
The snake had chained them this long. Skag recovered with an inward revulsion that rent him. He plunged down the path, his faculties surging—thought, feeling, realisation, volition—tearing him.
He met Dhanah carrying an utterly limp girl in his arms—the boy's face gone grey.
As Skag fled on past Dhanah, the whole story of Dhoop Ki Dhil was eating in his brain like fire. She was somewhere in there ahead of him—somewhere near that monster snake.
The weaving of the serpent's head, looping in long reaches above the bamboo tops—looking over them, looking down into them, looking for its prey—had frozen him to the marrow of his bones.
Dhoop Ki Dhil had come out into this blind maze to find and save the heat-blighted child from—that death. He knew what that death was like—he had seen a big snake kill a goat once, in the circus, for food. . . . The frost in his bones bit deeper, because this was Dhoop Ki Dhil—the wonder-woman—who was in there, somewhere close to that snake. He heard the Bombay Doctor's tones again, as he ran; and the words of the brown-robed mystic went like flame and acid through his blood.
. . . Why couldn't he hear Cadman? Cadman had the gun. But if he himself could only reach her before the snake—if he could only— And a soft blur of sun-melted red loomed ahead of him.