tops it was necessary to be always on the watch. 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. 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. For a
moment or two it hung by the fore-paws, coughing and frothing at
the mouth. Then this last hold relaxed and it fell, bumping with a
curious deliberation from branch to branch. It vanished through a
floor of thick leafage, and struck the ground with a dull crash. 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 Grom, glancing at A-ya, muttered quietly: "It is better to be up
here than down there." As he spoke, and they all peered downwards,
a dreadful head, with the limp body of the leopard gripped like a
rat between its long jaws and dripping yellow fang, thrust itself
up through the floor of leafage and stared at them with round eyes
as cold and black as ice.

Grom itched to shoot an arrow into one of those unwinking, devilish
eyes. But arrows were too precious to be wasted.

That night they slept profoundly on a platform which they wove of
branches in one of the tallest and most unscalable trees. They kept
watch, of course, turn and turn about; but nothing attempted to
approach them, and they cared little for the sounds of strife, the
crashings of pursuit and desperate flight, which came up to them at
intervals from the blackness far below.

On the morrow, however, as they were pursuing their aerial path along
the borders of a narrow, sluggish bayou, they were suddenly made to
realize that the tree-tops held perils more deadly than that of the
lurking leopards. They were all staring down into the water, which
swarmed with gigantic crocodiles and boiled immediately beneath them
with the turmoil of a life-and-death struggle between two of the
brutes, when