But look there, Meldrum, is that hand of yours mad or
drunk, or what is it?”

Old Patterson, the oldest man of my crew, and as steady as the Pyramids,
had been stationed in the bows with a boat-hook to fend off the drifting
logs which came sweeping down with the current. Now he stood with
crooked knees, glaring out in front of him, and one forefinger stabbing
furiously at the air. “Look at it!” he yelled. “Look at it!”

And at the same instant we saw it. A huge black tree trunk was coming down the river, its broad glistening
back just lapped by the water. And in front of it—about three feet in
front—arching upwards like the figure-head of a ship, there hung a
dreadful face, swaying slowly from side to side. It was flattened,
malignant, as large as a small beer-barrel, of a faded fungoid colour,
but the neck which supported it was mottled with a dull yellow and
black. As it flew past the _Gamecock_ in the swirl of the waters I saw
two immense coils roll up out of some great hollow in the tree, and the
villainous head rose suddenly to the height of eight or ten feet,
looking with dull, skin-covered eyes at the yacht. An instant later the
tree had shot past us and was plunging with its horrible passenger
towards the Atlantic. “What was it?” I cried. “It is our fiend of the cooperage,” said Dr. Severall, and he had become
in an instant the same bluff, self-confident man that he had been
before. “Yes, that is the devil who has been haunting our island. It is
the great python of the Gaboon.”

I thought of the stories which I had heard all down the coast of the
monstrous constrictors of the interior, of their periodical appetite,
and of the murderous effects of their deadly squeeze. Then it all took
shape in my mind. There had been a freshet the week before. It had
brought down this huge hollow tree with its hideous occupant. Who knows
from what far distant tropical forest it may have come. It had been
stranded on the little east bay of the island. The cooperage had been
the nearest house. Twice with the return of its appetite it had carried
off the watchman. Last night it had doubtless come again, when Severall
had thought he saw something move at the window, but our lights had
driven it away. It had writhed onwards and had slain poor Walker in his
sleep. “Why did it not carry him off?” I asked. “The thunder and lightning must have scared the brute away. There’s your
steward, Meldrum. The sooner we have breakfast and get back to the
island the better, or some of those niggers might think that we had been
frightened.”




                            JELLAND’S VOYAGE


“Well,” said our Anglo-Jap as we all drew up our chairs round the
smoking-room fire, “it’s an old tale out yonder, and may have spilt over
into print for all I know. I don’t want to turn this club-room into a
chestnut stall, but it is a long way to the Yellow Sea, and it is just
as likely that none of you have ever heard of the yawl _Matilda_, and of
what happened to Henry Jelland and Willy McEvoy aboard of her. “The middle of the sixties was a stirring time out in Japan. That was
just after the Simonosaki bombardment, and before the Daimio affair. There was a Tory party and there was a Liberal party among the natives,
and the question that they were wrangling over was whether the throats
of the foreigners should be cut or not. I tell you all, politics have
been tame to me since then. If you lived in a treaty port, you were
bound to wake up and take an interest in them. And to make it better,
the outsider had no way of knowing how the game was going. If the
opposition won it would not be a newspaper paragraph that would tell him
of it, but a good old Tory in a suit of chain mail, with a sword in each
hand, would drop in and let him know all about it in a single upper cut. “Of course it makes men reckless when they are living on the edge of a
volcano like that. Just at first they are very jumpy, and then there
comes a time when they learn to enjoy life while they have it. I tell
you, there’s nothing makes life so beautiful as when the shadow of death
begins to fall across it. Time is too precious to be dawdled away then,
and a man lives every minute of it. That was the way with us in
Yokohama. There were many European places of business which had to go on
running, and the men who worked them made the place lively for seven
nights in the week. “One of the heads of the European colony was Randolph Moore, the big
export merchant. His offices were in Yokohama, but he spent a good deal
of his time at his house up in Jeddo, which had only just been opened to
the trade. In his absence he used to leave his affairs in the hands of
his head clerk, Jelland, whom he knew to be a man of great energy and
resolution. But energy and resolution are two-edged things, you know,
and when they are used against you you don’t appreciate them so much. “It was gambling that set Jelland wrong. He was a little dark-eyed
fellow with black curly hair—more than three-quarters Celt, I should
imagine. Every night in the week you would see him in the same place, on
the left-hand side of the croupier at Matheson’s _rouge et noir_ table. For a long time he won, and lived in better style than his employer. And
then came a turn of luck, and he began to lose so that at the end of a
single week his partner and he were stone broke, without a dollar to
their names. “This partner was a clerk in the employ of the same firm—a tall,
straw-haired young Englishman called McEvoy. He was a good boy enough at
the start, but he was clay in the hands of Jelland, who fashioned him
into a kind of weak model of himself. They were for ever on the prowl
together, but it was Jelland who led and McEvoy who followed. Lynch and
I and one or two others tried to show the youngster that he could come
to no good along that line, and when we were talking to him we could win
him round easily enough, but five minutes of Jelland would swing him
back again. It may have been animal magnetism or what you like, but the
little man could pull the big one along like a sixty-foot tug in front
of a full-rigged ship. Even when they had lost all their money they
would still take their places at the table and look on with shining eyes
when any one else was raking in the stamps. “But one evening they could keep out of it no longer. Red had turned up
sixteen times running, and it was more than Jelland could bear. He
whispered to McEvoy, and then said a word to the croupier. “‘Certainly, Mr. Jelland; your cheque is as good as notes,’ said he. “Jelland scribbled a cheque and threw it on the black. The card was the
king of hearts, and the croupier raked in the little bit of paper. Jelland grew angry, and McEvoy white. Another and a heavier cheque was
written and thrown on the table. The card was the nine of diamonds. McEvoy leaned his head upon his hands and looked as if he would faint. ‘By God!’ growled Jelland, ‘I won’t be beat,’ and he threw on a cheque
that covered the other two.