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While the rest of the tribe gave itself up to the feasting, Grôm and Loob, and half a dozen of the other warriors, kept vigilant watch whilst they ate, distrusting the black depths of jungle and the deep, reed-fringed pools beyond the circle of light.
In the next instant he struck down furiously with his spear, catching his assailant between the shoulder-blades and driving the stroke home with all his strength. With a screech, the beast stiffened out, and then, somewhat slowly, collapsed. As Loob wrenched his weapon free, the great animal slumped limply from its branch.
As the drowning monsters battled to get their front legs up upon the raft, the edges gave way continually beneath them, plunging them again and again beneath the surface, while A-ya stabbed at them vengefully with her spear, and Loob shot arrows into them till Grôm stopped him, saying that the arrows were too precious to waste.
With furious words and blows he tried to make the tribe scatter to right and left, so as to spread the pressure as widely as possible. Perceiving his purpose, A-ya and Loob, and several of the leading warriors, seconded his efforts with frantic vehemence; till in a few minutes the whole tribe, amazed and quaking with awe, was extended like a fan over a front of three or four hundred yards.
Loob the scout, little and dark and hairy, with the eyes of a weasel and the heart of a bull buffalo, went darting and gliding soundlessly through the undergrowth a few paces to the left, guarding against the approach of any attack from the jungle-depths.
Once the little hairy scout, Loob, who traveled always on the outskirts of the party, was struck at suddenly by a huge black leopard, which lay ambushed in the crotch of a tree. Loob, however, who was so quick-sighted that he seemed to see things before they actually happened, leapt to a higher branch in time to escape the deadly paw.
"That will come in time," declared Grôm confidently. "Here's something coming now," announced Loob, springing to his feet and grabbing his bow. At the same moment the flat, villainous head of a big crocodile shot up over the edge of the raft, and its owner, with enormous jaws half open, started to scramble aboard.
At the same time, edging in closer to the wood, he whispered: "Don't run. But if they come we must go up the first tree. They are swift as the wind, these great beasts, and more terrible than the saber-tooth." "Can't go in these trees!" said Loob, whose piercing eyes had investigated them minutely at the first glimpse of the monsters in the grass.
It must have fallen under the very jaws of an unseen waiting monster; for there arose at once a strange, hooting roar, followed by the sound of rending flesh and cracking bone. Loob grinned over his feat, and Grôm, glancing at A-ya, muttered quietly: "It is better to be up here than down there."
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