"Can I not kill him?" thought I, as furious thoughts began to fill my mind; "my hoe is too light--ha! the stone!"
I snatched the stone, which with difficulty I had conveyed up the tree overnight, as a missile against wild animals, and poised it in my hands. It was nearly twelve pounds weight, and the woolly skull of the King was immediately below me; but it might be thick as that of an elephant, so the missile would prove more harmless than a ball of worsted.
If I missed, death to me was certain; if I slew or stunned him, I had an equal certainty of escape. Then I thought of poor Captain Baylis, of his tortured wife, of Hartly, and of that horrible butchery by the steep rocks of the river Gabon, and a glow of merciless fury filled my soul!
The stone shot from my hand, and, bathed in blood, quivering and senseless, the brutal King of the Snake River rolled among the long dry grass, with foam issuing from his mouth, and the aperture below it.
Swift as lightning I descended the tree--all cramped and stiff by a night passed amid its branches; caught his dromedary by the bridle, sprang upon its back, snatched up the asseguy as a weapon for defence, and, without casting a glance to ascertain whether I had been guilty of actual regicide, or had merely given him a crack upon his imperial crown, urged the animal I bestrode westward at furious speed, through a grove of pale green orange trees, where the rich dewy fruit hung like balls of gleaming gold in the light of the morning sun.
Steering my course westward, so closely as I could judge, I rode rapidly through wild and pathless places; and when mounted on an animal so sure and swift of foot, I felt more confident of escape from any savages in whose way I might fall.
I was not without a dread of wild animals, for the furious lion and the stealthy panther roam everywhere through the forests of Africa; and though nearly the whole day passed without meeting one of either species, hundreds of pernicious serpents, black, or brown, or green and scaly, with glaring eyes, hissed at me from amid the long rank grass; while brightly pinioned birds flew about me, and horrid baboons and monkeys, of all kinds and sizes, leaped and frisked on every hand, springing from branch to branch of the trees, where they swung madly to and fro by their tails as I passed.