Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 2 (1925-02).djvu/163

sigh, though somewhat louder than the one I had heard on the veranda. Then there came that jungle odor, that putrid breath from distant wilds.

Turning my eyes upward, I perceived the cause of my terror. There, with its expanded neck and devilish head poised in a curve within six inches of my face, its eyes staring straight into the depths of mine, its body coiled on my lower limbs, was the horror of creation—a giant cobra de capello. . . .

Somehow a strange calm came over me, and I looked away from the snake. Then I closed my eyes and accepted darkness and death. It seemed that I waited hours for the blow. If I made a movement, perhaps it would come. I decided to end the agony by moving. Just as I felt the muscles respond for the movement of my legs, I changed my mind—what little reason I had left. I would try thought.

I thought of Koo. If he were asleep, I could not wake him by sound, but perhaps I could by thought. I turned on the full current. Koo . . . Koo . . . Koo . . . Koo . . . Koo. . . . A hundred times I thought his name and blessed his yellow skin. . . .

After what seemed an interminable period I heard a light footfall somewhere. I opened my eyes. A silent flash streamed toward me from the other side of the room near the hall door. The snake lifted its coils from my lower limbs, its oppressive magnetism from my upper body, and with a mighty leap, collected its length in a writhing mass upon the bedroom floor.

Koo had risked my life by piercing the snake's head with a silencer-bullet just a fraction of a second before it was to have struck. The leap from the bed was aided by the tense muscles prepared for the blow at me.

I sprang from the bed and switched on the light. Loon Koo stood with pistol trained on the now harmless head, and the reptile's reflex action thrashed its tail about the floor.

"How did you know, Koo?" I cried.

"Hot bleeze die down . . . night cool off . . . me feelem dwaft and wakee. Hear something in hall . . . see slaykee . . . hunt long time for gun . . . then shoot. . . ."

And Koo smiled, calm and collected, as is ever his kind.

I looked into the mirror. To attest the agony I had suffered I saw that my eyebrows stood straight out from the skin, and my forehead was speckled with little beads of sweated blood!