Followed instantly two thin jets of liquid, as much as anything I can think of like those lines called “trajectory curves” which ballisticians do so love to draw in books on rifle-shooting; only, these curved lines began at the hollow point of Mr. Cobra’s poison-fangs, and were meant to end in Mr. Ratel’s eyes.  They didn’t.  Old man ratel, he was standing on his hind-legs, with his sturdy paws in front of his eyes—­like a man who looks across a sunny land—­and seemed just about to turn a somersault again.  He changed his mind, though, when the poison, that would have blinded him for life—­and that life wouldn’t have been long in that wild then, I want to tell you—­stopped, and he went in at that black-necked, legless, soulless servant of Satan, utterly and amazingly unafraid.  It was fine.

Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you that when Nature repented, and gave the ratel a courage surpassing the courage of any other beast on earth, she also gave him a skin tough as a pachyderm’s, and loose, as if it were two sizes too large; and that is why that black-necked cobra died quite quickly, and the ratel didn’t, even slowly.  Even if the snake’s fangs had got through, which was not in the least likely, that did not mean to say they would touch Mr. Ratel’s person inside.  This, by the way, may explain why being spitted on thorns, like a beetle on a pin, when the bull-gnu charged, did not seem to worry him much, either.

The moon was up when the wounded mother ratel, on guard at the mouth of her burrow, looked up sharply.  A side-striped jackal, who kidded himself she had not seen him lying in wait to find out, when she went hunting, what she hid in that den, suddenly bolted with a yap; and a hyena, represented by two burning eyes, who appeared, by some magic of his own, to guess she was wounded, jumped up and made way for something that approached.  It was her husband and the cobra, the latter trailing along limply behind, who came that way; and even the hyena had retired, with an audible sigh—­at least, it wasn’t a moan quite—­when he claimed the path.  After all, there is no sense, if you are the most cowardly beast for your power on earth, in getting up against the pluckiest thing in creation in full possession of life and liberty.

Later our ratel sallied forth to “face the world” again.  His wife had recovered from her wounds—­the result, these, of refusing to believe she was not so good as a twelve-foot python, and a bit better—­sufficiently to walk slowly; but that was not enough to face that wild where die-quicks, from lions, down through leopards, hyenas, wild-dogs, jackals, and the rest, are forever hiding, on the lookout for unfortunate ones flying an S.O.S. signal.  No, he must go and do the provisioning alone, and alone he went.

For a peaceful beast, one only too pleased to mind his own business and thank other folks to mind theirs, his subsequent doings were rather astonishing.  This was because he cared for neither man nor beast nor devil, in the first place, and because the night produced all three, in the second.