Adventure, December 3, 1920 — page 71: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

re --) Author of “The Spider,” AKE care, senhor! Lift your hand from the rail! Quick! \ Now you are safe. You did not see that big black ant crawling toward you, but you would soon have felt him. You would not have slept at all tonight, for your whole arm would have been full of keen, throbbing pain: Let me knock him to the deck and step on him. There, now he can do no harm. He is a tucandeira—the biggest, fiercest and most terrible ant to be found in all our Brazilian jungle. My foot has smeared him, but he must be an inch and a half long, and you can guess how powerful his jaws were. Yet his bite, bad as it is, is not somuch to be dreaded as the tor- ment that comes afterward—a maddening pain caused by the poison he throws into your flesh. What this poison may be I do not know; but I do know it is so strong that some of the wild Indians use tucandeiras, along with certain roots and bark, to make the tips of darts and arrows deadly. I know too that many people say the bites.of four of these ants will killa man Yet I believed that it would take more than four of them to destroy the life of a strong man. You know how it is—one man may die from a thing that. would only hurt-another. And— well, let me tell you of something I once saw with my own eyes. I WAS afloat in the flood-time, as I am now. But I was not sitting on the deck = of a fine steamer like this, nor was I on my way down this great Amazon, with noth- ing to do but smoke and talk. Instead I was in a canoe, among the wild hills of the upper 61 ike “Tucandeira by Arthur O ‘Friel “The Vampire,” etc. Javary region, speeding back toward the head- quarters of old Coronel Nunes, my employer. With me was a young comrade named Pedro, a rubber-worker like myself, who had been out with me on a long roving trip. We had met rough experiences, and now we had little food, few cartridges, and only one rifle; so that we did not wish to lose any time in reaching the end of our journey. | But we were not to end our trip as soon as we hoped to. Delay was not only waiting for us—it was coming to meet us. Ahead of us was a rather nasty bend in the little flooded river we were following—a place where the water swirled against a steep cliff and was turned sharply away in a new direction. The stream had been washing against this cliff for so many years that it had eaten the stone inward, and the upper part now hung out over the current. Under it the water sucked and boiled and whirled, making a place where it weuld be easy to capsize and hard to get out. We remembered it well, having had some difficulty there when we came up, and decided to go around it as fast as we could. Just as we were making the turn, Pedro, up in the bow, yelled sharply. Another yell blended with his. Something struck us a thumping, glancing blow. We heeled over so suddenly that L almost went overboard. But the canoe stopped tilting, and I saved myself by a grab at its higher edge. Then we went whirling and bumping along the face of the cliff until an eddy swept us clear. We were afoul 2f another canoe. It had Go 0)(0)(6) (C@