“Bless my shoe laces!” cried Mr. Damon.  “You don’t mean to say that the creatures can eat up a whole village?”

“Not quite.  Though they might if they got the chance,” was the answer of the Spanish guide.  “These vampire bats fly from place to place in great swarms, and they are so large and blood-thirsty that a few of them can kill a horse or an ox in a short time by sucking its blood.  So when the villagers find they are visited by a colony of these vampires they get out, taking their live stock with them, and stay in caves or in densely wooded places until the bats fly on.  Then the villagers come back.

“It was only a small colony that visited us to-night or we would have had more trouble.  I do not think this lot will come back.  We have killed too many of them,” and he looked about on the ground where many of the uncanny creatures were still twitching in the death struggle.

“Come back again!” cried Mr. Damon.  “Bless my skin!  I hope not!  I’ve had enough of bats—­ and mosquitoes,” he added, as he slapped at his face and neck.

Indeed the party of whites were set upon by the night insects to such an extent that it was necessary to hurry back to the protection of the nets.

Tom and Ned kicked outside the bat the former had killed in their tent, and then both went back to their cots.  But it was some little time before they fell asleep.  And they did not have much time to rest, for an early start must be made to avoid the terrible heat of the middle of the day.

“Whew!” whistled Ned, as he and Tom arose in the gray dawn of the morning when Jacinto announced the breakfast which the Indian cook had prepared.  “That was some night!  If this is a sample of the wilds of Honduras, give me the tameness of Shopton.”

“Oh, we’ve gone through with worse than this,” laughed Tom.  “It’s all in the day’s work.  We’ve only got started.  I guess we’re a bit soft, Ned, though we had hard enough work in that tunnel-digging.”

After breakfast, while the Indians were making ready the canoes, Professor Bumper, who, in a previous visit to Central America, had become interested in the subject, made a brief examination of some of the dead bats.  They were exceptionally large, some almost as big as hawks. and were of the sub-family Desmodidae, the scientist said.

“This is a true blood-sucking bat,” went on the professor.  “This,” and he pointed to the nose-leaves, “is the sucking apparatus.  The bat makes an opening in the skin with its sharp teeth and proceeds to extract the blood.  I can well believe two or three of them, attacking a steer or mule at once, could soon weaken it so the animal would die.”

“And a man, too?” asked Ned.

“Well a man has hands with which to use weapons, but a helpless quadruped has not.  Though if a sufficient number of these bats attacked a man at the same time, he would have small chance to escape alive.  Their bites, too, may be poisonous for all I know.”