e crew. No man
was moving there. Still the sound persisted. Lifting his net, he spied
beyond the hut of the Peruvians a moving mass on the ground--a
cylindrical bulk which looked to be two feet thick, and which glided
past like a solid stream of dark water flowing along above the dirt. Its
beginning and end were hidden in the bush, and not until it tapered into
nothing and was gone did he realize fully that he had been gazing at an
enormous anaconda. Then he kicked himself for not shooting it. But
before long he congratulated himself for letting it go.

Perhaps an hour later the startled forest resounded with an agonized
scream, so piercing and so appallingly human that all the camp sprang
awake. The outcry came but once, sounding from some place not far off,
near the water's edge, and in the direction toward which the huge
serpent had disappeared. Before the watcher had time to tell the others
of what he had seen, one of the boatmen discovered the rut left in the
soft ground by the reptile. Thereafter Knowlton kept his own counsel,
listening to the excited curses of the men and observing their pallor
and their nervous scanning of the shadows. Jose said the screech
undoubtedly was the death shriek of some animal caught and crushed in
the snake's tremendous coil. McKay concurred with a nod. And when
Knowlton casually said it was tough that nobody had been awake to shoot
the thing as it passed the camp, Jose emphatically disagreed.

A bullet fired into that fiendish giant, he averred, would have meant
death to one or more men; for the serpent's writhing coils and lashing
tail would have knocked down the sleeping-hut and shattered the spines
of any men they struck. No, let Senor Knowlton thank the saints that the
awful master of the swamps had gone its way unmolested. For the rest of
that night Knowlton kept his watch openly, accompanied by Jose and three
of the paddlers, who refused to sleep again until they should be miles
away from the vicinity of that dread monster.

Two nights afterward the camp was aroused again. Tim alone saw the start
of the disturbance, and he kept mum about it because he did not choose
to let the Peruvians know he had been on the alert. Out from the gloom
and straight past the huts a thick-bodied, curve-snouted animal came
charging madly for the river, carrying on its back a ferocious cat
creature whose fangs were buried deep in its steed's neck--a tapir
attacked by a jaguar. With a resounding