ave touched one of those slimy snakes I could see wriggling over the
leaves to the bottom of the still water. What else to do I had no more
notion than the dead. "It's the end, Jasper Begg," said I to myself,
"the end of you and your venture." But of Ruth Bellenden I wouldn't
think. How could I, when I knew the folks that were abroad on Ken's
Island?

I will just ask any traveller to stand with me where I stood that night
and to say if these words are overmuch for the plight, or if I have
spoken of it with moderation. A night as black as ink, mind you; my
company in the heart of a wood with big teak trees all round us, and
cliffs on our right hand towering up to the sky like mountains. Before
us a pool of inky water, all worming with odd lights and lines of blue
fire, like flakes of phosphorus on a bath, and alive with the hissing
of hundreds of snakes. Upon our left hand a scrubby thicket and a marsh
beneath it, I make sure; Czerny's devils, who had shot the poor folks
on the Santa Cruz, at our heels, and we but four against the lot of
them. Would any man, I ask, have believed that he could walk into such
a trap and get out of it unharmed? If so, it wasn't Jasper Begg, nor
Peter Bligh, nor little Dolly Venn, nor Seth Barker with the bludgeon
in his hand. They'd as good as given it up when we came to the pool and
stood there like hunting men that have lost all hope.

"Done, by all that's holy!" says Peter Bligh, drawing back from the
pond as from some horrid pit. "Snakes I have seen, nateral and
unnateral, but them yonder give me the creeps----"

"Creeps or no creeps, the others will be up here in five minutes, and
what are you going to do then, Peter Bligh, what then?" asks I, for as
I'm a living man I didn't know which way to turn from it.

Seth Barker was the one that answered me.

"I'm going to knock some nails in, by your leave," says he, and with
that he stood very still and bade us listen. The whole wood was full of
the sound of "halloaing" now. Far and wide I heard question and answer,
and a lingering yodle such as the Swiss boys make on the mountains. It
couldn't be many minutes, I said, before the first man was out on our
trail; and there I was right, for one of them came leaping out of the
wood straight into Peter Bligh's arms before I'd spoken another word.
Poor devil--it was the last good-night for him in this world--for Peter
passes him on, so to speak, and he went headlong into the pond without
any o