He and Gonzales seized the gunwales and bent low, shoving. The dug-out slipped down the slimy bank, through the ooze, into the water, and with final shove Maria and Francisco vaulted aboard. Maria in the stern, behind the trunk, Francisco kneeling at Charley's feet, between the bedding rolls, they grasped their paddles, and swung the canoe up-stream. With a few powerful strokes they left behind them the bank, where the white horde, crazed by the sight of another boat making start, shouted and gestured more frantically than ever. Charley just glimpsed still another boat putting out from the landing, when his canoe swept around a curve, and landing and crowd and village all were blotted from view by a mass of foliage. Even the sounds of bargaining ceased. The canoe might have been a thousand miles into the wilderness, where nobody lived. "All right," remarked Charley's father, settling himself comfortably. "Now 'go ahead,' as they say. There are 300 people waiting at Panama for the _California_, and I only hope we get there in time." "Maria says we'll reach Cruces in three days, if we don't have accidents," spoke Mr. Grigsby. "Might as well enjoy the scenery." The dug-out was called a cayuca. It was about twenty feet long, but very narrow, and was hollowed from a single trunk of mahogany--for mahogany was as common down here as pine up North. Charley felt quite luxurious, riding in a mahogany boat! He never had dreamed of such scenery. The crooked river flowed between a perfect mass of solid green blotched with blazes of flowers. Bananas, plantains, cocoa and other palms, bread-fruit, gigantic teak trees, dense leaved mangoes, acacias and mangroves on stilt roots like crutches, sugar-cane, sapotes with sweet green fruit the size of one's head, sapodillas with fruit looking like russet apples, mahogany, rose-wood, and a thousand others which neither Mr. Grigsby nor Charley's father recognized, grew wild, as thick as grass--and every tree and shrub was wreathed with flowering vines trying to drag it down. Monkeys and parrots and other odd beasts and birds screamed and gamboled in the branches; and in the steeply rising jungle and in the water strange noises were continually heard. There were violent splashes and snorts from alligators--and Mr. Grigsby saw two wild boars. Now and then sluggish savannahs or swamps opened on right or left, filled with vegetation and animals. It was the rainy season and the river was running full, about seventy-five yards wide, with a strong current in the middle. Paddling hard, Maria and Francisco zigzagged from side to side across the bends, seeking the stiller water and the eddies. Trees bent over and almost brushed the canoe--and suddenly Maria, in the stern, cried out and pointed. "Python!" he uttered. "Mira! (Look!)"