However, he did not expect to use it, and had it ready merely as a precautionary measure.
Five minutes passed, and the silence of the shore remained profound.
Jerry sniffed Skipper's bare leg as if to assure him that he was beside him no matter what threatened from the hostile silence of the land, then stood up with his forepaws on the gunwale and continued to sniff eagerly and audibly, to prick his neck hair, and to utter low growls.
"They're there, all right," Skipper confided to him; and Jerry, with a sideward glance of smiling eyes, with a bobbing of his tail and a quick love-flattening of his ears, turned his nose shoreward again and resumed his reading of the jungle tale that was wafted to him on the light fans of the stifling and almost stagnant air.
"Hey!" Van Horn suddenly shouted.

"Hey, you fella boy stick 'm head out belong you!" As if in a transformation scene, the apparently tenantless jungle spawned into life.

On the instant a hundred stark savages appeared.

They broke forth everywhere from the vegetation.

All were armed, some with Snider rifles and ancient horse pistols, others with bows and arrows, with long throwing spears, with war-clubs, and with long-handled tomahawks.