"There! Look yonder, Ben!" cried Ralph. "Confound the luck!"
The spider was swiftly crawling up the bank, where it quickly disappeared beneath a tussock.
"That beats all the creatures I ever seen," said Ben. "He must be the great grandfather of all the spiders hereabout."
Mr. Duff, also awakened by the noise, now suggested that it was time they were going on. While proceeding up stream Ralph related his own and Ben's experience with the spider, whereat the mate laughed heartily.
"I am familiar with the species," said he. "True, they do look scary enough, but, strange to say, they are perfectly harmless. Instead of teeth, their mouth is supplied with a kind of suction apparatus by which they suck the blood from smaller insects. But they cannot bite, nor is their touch poisonous. There are other, smaller kinds of spiders about here, however, whose bite is fatal."
"We were jist as bad scared as if it had been a rattlesnake," returned Ben. "I could feel me bloomin' hair turnin' gray when the thing was cocked upon me shoulder."
Towards night they came to a dozen or more small huts made of palm leaves and elephant grass, from which issued a number of nearly naked blacks, who made the air hideous with shouts of welcome.
Here was where they were to trade for fresh meat and vegetables—the object of their river trip.
One tall savage, with a pair of bullock's horns as a head dress, and with his hair reeking with grease, coiled round the same, appeared to be the head man of the village.
He wore a long red flannel shirt as an additional badge of dignity. The rest, men as well as women, wore little else but cloths about the loins.