ow-watcher
no words came; for, as Joe told his companion afterwards, he too tried
to speak but was as helpless.

At last, in that long-drawn agony of dread, as he fully expected to be
seized, Rob's presence of mind came back, and he recollected that his
gun was lying shotted beneath the canvas of the sail at the side, and,
seizing it with the energy of despair, he swung the piece round, cocking
both barrels as he did so, and brought them into sharp contact with
Joe's arm.

"Steady there with that gun," said a low familiar voice. "Don't shoot."

"Shaddy!" panted Rob.

"Me it is, lad. I crep' along so as not to disturb Mr Brazier. I say,
did you hear that roar in the water?--but o' course you did. Know what
it was?"

"No!" cried both boys in a breath. "Some great kind of amphibious
thing," added Rob.

"'Phibious thing!--no. I couldn't see it, but there was no doubt about
it: that threshing with the tail told me."

"Yes, we heard its tail beating," said Joe quickly. "What was it?"

"What was them, you mean! Well, I'll tell you. One of them tapir
things must have been wading about in a shallow of mud, and a great
'gator got hold of him, and once he'd got hold he wouldn't let go, but
hung on to the poor brute and kept on trying to drag him under water.
Horrid things, 'gators. I should like to shoot the lot."

Rob drew a long breath very like a sigh. An alligator trying to drag
down one of the ugly, old-world creatures that looks like a pig which
has made up its mind to grow into an elephant, and failed--like the frog
in the fable, only without going quite so far--after getting its upper
lip sufficiently elongated to do some of the work performed by an
elephant's trunk! One of these jungle swamp pachyderms and a reptile
engaged in a struggle in the river, and not some terrible water-dragon
with a serpentlike tail such as Rob's imagination had built up with the
help of pictures of fossil animals and impossible objects from heraldry!
It took all nervousness and mystery out of the affair, and made Rob
feel annoyed that he had allowed his imagination to run riot and create
such an alarming scene.

"Getting towards morning, isn't it?" said Joe hastily, and in a tone
which told of his annoyance, too, that he also should have participated
in the scare.

"Getting that way, lad, I s'pose. I ain't quite doo to relieve the
watch, but I woke up and got thinking a deal about our job to-morrow,
and that made me