Then came the rain, in furious white sheets that filled the forest with a flying haze. It soaked him instantly to the skin, while peal after peal of thunder went off like cannon shots. An ungovernable terror seized the boy--the fury of the wind-driven rain, the loneliness, the crashing and riving of limbs and branches--and he lifted up his voice in one last, despairing yell with every ounce of lung power that he possessed. There was no answer--save a low, sibilant hiss, which sounded through the lowering gloom, close at hand, whispering sharp and clear in his ears above the noise of the storm! Dwight, startled with a shiver of fright, looked up, to perceive that one of the great vines overhead was _not_ a creeper, but a huge python, lowering himself steadily, his neck crooked, and his head drawn back to strike at him! His gun flashed to shoulder, and both barrels went off blindly as the boy’s nerves collapsed with the shock of horror and he sank down in a shivering heap. He had a dim feeling of yards and yards of snake tumbling down through the vines beside him, but he seemed not to care about it at all, for it was comfortable down here between these roots ... if he could only find a place for his head.... When he came to it was pitch dark and the storm had gone on. A scampering of jungle rats made off through the black as Dwight moved his cramped limbs wearily, to find them aching all over and his face hot and flushed with fever, while violent chills kept running upward through his body. He peered about him, bewildered; then conscious ideas began to pelt in upon him. “F-f-fire! Quick-ick as I can m-make one!” he chattered to himself, fumbling for his pocket flasher. Its small but brilliant light lit up the jungle, causing many an outcry of night birds and a scurrying over the forest floor of land crabs and small marsupials. It also revealed the tumbled heap of the python lying beside him, its neck shot in two and parts of its reticulated length already gnawed by rodents. He glanced at it casually; to get wood that would burn was the real worry now! the jungle was black as a pocket, and a wan mist hung through it. After one flash of the light on those miasmas, drifting like pale death through the trees, Dwight hurriedly got out his medicine kit and swallowed some quinine. Then he sought kindlings in the underbrush, breaking twigs here and there, but they were all sodden and moldy. He felt sick all over and burning with fever, and he wanted to lie down again and sleep forever; but it was most imperative to stay alive, so he started off through the jungle in search of firewood, stumbling westward by compass, until a great tangle of vines ahead of him told of a prone dead tree.