The sound rose again, a low, hoarse rumble.  It was distant thunder.  A storm was coming.  He heard it a third time.  It was not thunder.  It was the deep growl of some fierce, wild animal.  For a moment the boy was afraid.  Then he remembered the heavy pistol that never left his belt.  It still carried the original load, a large bullet with plenty of gunpowder behind it.

The sounds were repeated and they were nearer.  They were like a long drawn p-u, p-u, p-u.  The tone was of indescribable ferocity.  Ned was brave, but he shivered all over and there was a prickly sensation at the roots of his hair.  He felt like some primeval youth who with club alone must face the rush of the saber-toothed tiger.  But he drew upon his reserves of pride which were large.  He would not awaken Obed, but, drawing the pistol and holding his fingers on trigger and hammer, he walked a little distance down the bank of the stream.  That terrible p-u, p-u, p-u, suddenly sounded much closer at hand, and Ned shrank back, stiffening with horror.

A great black beast, by far the largest wild animal that he had ever seen, came silently out of the jungle and stood before the boy.  He was a good seven feet in length, black as a coal, low but of singularly thick and heavy build.  His shoulders and paws were more powerful than those of a tiger.  As he stood there before Ned, black and sinister as Satan, he opened his mouth, and emitted again that fearful, rumbling p-u, p-u, p-u.

Ned could not move.  All his power seemed to have gone into his eyes and he only looked.  He saw the red eyes, the black lips wrinkling back from the long, cruel fangs, and the glossy skin rippling over the tremendous muscles.  Ned suddenly wrenched himself free from this paralysis of the body, leveled the pistol and fired at a mark midway between the red eyes.

There was a tremendous roar and the animal leaped.  Ned sprang to one side.  The huge beast with blood pouring from his head turned and would have been upon him at the second leap, but a long barrel and then an arm was projected over Ned’s shoulder.  A pistol was fired almost in his ear.  The monster’s spring was checked in mid-flight, and he fell to the earth, dead.  Ned too, fell, but in a faint.

CHAPTER IX

THE RUINED TEMPLES

Ned revived and sat up.  Cold water which Obed had brought in his hat from the river was dripping from his face.  At his feet lay a huge black animal, terrible even in death.  There was one wound in his head, where Ned’s bullet had gone in, and another through the right eye, where Obed’s had entered, reaching the brain.  Ned’s strength now returned fully and the color came back to his face.  He stood up, but he shuddered nevertheless.

“Obed,” he said gratefully, “you came just in time.”

“I surely did,” said that cheerful artisan.  “A bullet in time saved a life like thine.  But you had already given him a bad wound.”