ding straight for his place of concealment. Had they
scented him? Forty yards--thirty--twenty--he watched them with a
horrible fascination. Then they both disappeared. Now was the time.
Placing a foot in the nick he had cut in the clay bank, and with his
left hand firmly grasping a bough overhead, Gerard drew himself up. By
cautiously shifting his position, he gained a little more height, and
thus hanging by the grip of his left hand, his body bent out over the
water, in which he had stood up to his knees, Gerard awaited the attack
of the formidable reptiles.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

BETWEEN TWO PERILS.

Nothing is so prone to defeat its own end as the fixed, overstrained
attentiveness of intense expectation. The eye, riveted on one point,
almost ceases to see it; the mind, dwelling on one person or object,
confuses the idea of that person or object twenty times over. Thus
Gerard Ridgeley, hanging there, staring down into the waters of the
Black Umfolosi, momentarily expecting the swift stealthy rush, to behold
the current darkened by the hideous shape of the huge lizard rising
beneath him, soon lost the power of seeing almost anything at all, so
intense was the strain upon his faculties of sight and hearing. Minutes
were like aeons. His muscles seemed cracking. The terrible suspense
seemed to tell upon him physically, to exhaust him. Then suddenly there
rose out of the water a pair of great bony jaws, and closing with a
vicious snap within half a yard of his body, sank back again out of
sight as suddenly and noiselessly as they had appeared.

Appalling as this occurrence was, its effect was salutary. The presence
of real and tangible danger broke the spell of his terrible suspense.
Gerard was himself again now. So narrowly had the monster failed to
seize him, that he had almost seemed to be looking into those hideous
jaws with their saw-like and curved-back teeth, could distinguish the
scales on the gaunt bony head, and mark the fiend-like expression in the
beady cruel eye. Certainly the brute would come again, and this time it
would be one or the other of them.

Grasping his impromptu bayonet, Gerard waited, cool and calm now, but
every faculty on the alert. There was a ripple and a swirl on the
water, showing that something was moving beneath; and so strange are the
fancies that flash through our minds at critical times, that at that
moment Gerard remembered how often he had marked that same ripple