"He stood there with his eyes glaring at the water, and a shaking finger pointing into the very heart of the yeller flood. There stood out the root of a tree, and clinging to the root the coils of a snake, with his gleaming head moving like a branch. Jest a moment it showed, then the water swirled over it again. "`Let go of my arm,' I said, for his fingers were biting into me, and the look of him made me afeard, so that I talked gruffly. "`Did you see it?' he said, and then he jest collapsed like a bundle of clothes. I had a good mind to leave him there, but, instead, I histed him on to my shoulders, and poured enough Cango into him to make him forget his name. He wasn't fit to stand until a couple of days after, and then wha' jer think he did? Cut up his clothes into shreds and laughed fit to kill himself when I found him at it. Of course, I thought he was clean daft, but he weren't, and for the first time, with my old corduroys on him, he sat by the camp fire, sipping his coffee, and talking--talking mainly about snakes and bloodhounds, and things that made my backbone whang like a broken fiddle-string. He frightened himself, too, so that when he saw the long _achter-oss_ sjambok quivering on the ground where the driver had thrown it, his jaw got rigid, and moved up and down without any words coming from his mouth. Then, with a sort of sob, he snatched up the axe, and I'm blowed if he didn't cut that sjambok into a thousand bits. It was a good sjambok, too, made of rhinoceros hide, as thick as your wrist at the butt and going off to a point, and when I told the idiot what he'd done, he jes' went off into another unnateral fit of wild laughter, after which he paid me a guinea and went to bed. Putting this, that, and the other together, with the Cango brandy, I guessed my man had got snakes in his head, and I kept the demijohn under lock. That calmed him down, and he was all right until we came to the Orange River, where we had to camp while the water went down. About fifty wagons were there waiting to cross, and there was quite a stir with all the fellows moving about visiting. When we had outspanned, I joined a group to hear about the state of the roads, the condition of the veld for grazing, and all them things that transport riders talk about, when one chap asked if I had heard the news. `What news?' says I. `About that snake,' says he; `he was seen at the Riet River drift last week.' `Yes,' says another, `and two days before he was at Aliwal North.' `I heard from the mail coach driver,' says a third, `that the snake overtook his coach, stopped the horses, and took a steady look at all the passengers, after which he went across the veld, leaving 'em all frozen with terror. It was twenty feet long, and its eyes were like black diamonds.'