t of lather fringed the saddle blanket over the withers
and down both shoulders. The Sergeant, seeing his men fall behind,
galloped up into the lead and cursed them on with graphic phrases
culled from the English, Spanish and Malay tongues. But it was
useless: the gray pony carried its desperately anxious rider faster
than their jaded mounts could travel. Terry drew out of sight, but
they rode on.

All through the afternoon Terry had been dimly conscious that the
headache had returned, that his face was flushed and hot, but the fast
pumping blood seemed to energize his faculties. Never had he felt so
keyed-up, so sinewy of nerve.

The hours flew with the miles. At five o'clock he crashed out of the
woods into an open spot where the trail bent down toward the river to
skirt a deep black pool--the Bogobos' Crocodile Hole, which none of
them would ever approach. It was a roughly circular depression
extending from bank to bank, a hundred feet in diameter; it lay just
below the ledge of rock that made a low-water ford but which, at high
water, was the brink of a falls which had worn a deep hole in the soft
river bottom.

Terry slowed his steaming pony as he rounded the pool. Stories that he
had overheard flashed across his mind, ghastly stories whispered by
tremulous native lips into credulous brown ears, of the size of the
Thing which dwelt here, of its age, its incredible scaly length and
girth, its patient devilish cunning; of the toll it had taken of three
generations, tales you would not care to hear--like that of the old
blind Bogobo who lost his way, and groping for the trail with naked
hands--no, you would not care to hear such appalling tales.

Riding the river ledge above the pool he glanced down into the deep,
quiet waters but his thoughts snapped back to the present as his pony
balked at the edge of the ford. The gray had never balked at water,
and attributing the display of vice to fatigue, he tried to gentle him
into the shallow water, then touched him with spur--minutes were
precious now. Driven by the steel, the gray stepped gingerly into the
stream, took several steps, then snorted as he wheeled back to the
bank. Terry swung him back sharply and sent the spur deep into the
flanks of the trembling beast: half wild with the unaccustomed
punishment he dashed into the water and splashed across in frightened
bounds that took him up the opposite bank into the brush.

Terry brought the pony round and stroked