Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/247

 A canoe, which had emerged from behind the point of willows far up the cove, came skimming across the glassy surface. The white man who sat in the bow, a rifle across his knees, had not yet recovered from his amazement, though he carefully concealed this fact from his negro paddler. He was not a Low Countryman, but an uplander who had come to the Low Country to fish for black bass, and it pleased him to pretend that he made astonishing shots like this as a matter of course. He leaped out of the canoe the moment its bow touched the bank and, disregarding the negro's word of caution, advanced toward his victim.

Luckily for him, he was just beyond the danger zone when the king of the river came to life. So swiftly that the man's eye could scarcely follow the sweep of the long tail, the great gator's massive body bent itself like a bow, then instantly straightened. The man leaped back and, jerking the rifle to his shoulder, fired into the heaving water where a colossal black bulk, catapulted outward from the bank by the powerful muscles of that mighty tail, had vanished as if by magic.

Fifty feet from the shore the king of the river came to the surface. Straight down the middle of the cove he rushed, his juggernaut head and eight feet of his armored rugged back showing above the water. Madness had him—madness that was some-