Bomba the jungle boy

A moment before he had been making his way with surprising suppleness and ease through the tangled brushwood, avoiding with equal dexterity the vines that trailed from the branc...

At the moment that Bomba made his first startled leap he heard close behind him the thud of a body as it struck the earth. The reptile had missed its spring.

“Indian nothing!” retorted the other, as his keen eyes swept the lad. “Look at his hair, his eyes, his features. He’s as white as we are, or my name isn’t Gillis. Look again, Do...

“I wonder if he really knows what he is talking about,” cried Gillis. “Tell me,” he demanded turning to Bomba, “what makes you think there are jaguars all about us?”

The stricken jaguar landed on the spot where but a moment before, Gillis and Dorn had stood, and sprawled out in a heap. It made one or two frantic digs at its throat in the att...

Bomba had never before come face to face with a member of the tribe of head-hunters. Only at rare intervals had any of these men of evil omen invaded that section of the jungle...

The thought that this might be the den of a wild beast had occurred to him when he first saw the mouth of the cave, but it had been crowded out by his desperate need of escaping...

He knew he could not reach the shore before the dreadful thing would be upon him. But he would struggle till the last. As a final resource he had his knife.

A groan was his only answer. But it was enough, for it told him that his only friend and comrade was entrapped within. Already he might have been burned beyond any possibility o...

Before it, he remained inarticulate, dumb, though there stirred in him a great longing to comfort his companion. The white men, he thought, would have slapped him on the back an...

As Bomba’s eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom of the hut they caught sight of the horrid creature that had provoked Casson’s cry of warning—a blood-sucking vampire bat, as...

Casson took it in his shaking fingers and examined it. Long years before he had been an expert shot with both rifle and revolver and was thoroughly familiar with their mechanisms.

The wailing cry had a strange and instant effect upon the beast. It had crouched as though for a spring, but now it hesitated. It had never seen a human with a gleaming mouth li...

In the jabbering monosyllable chatter, which Bomba from years of intimacy and observation had come to understand sufficiently to get its essential meaning, Tatuc gave the boy th...

All creatures of the jungle fly to shelter before the fury of the storm. Bomba knew this full well, as did all living creatures of these wilds, large and small.

Again and again Bomba was compelled to make detours. But he advanced rapidly, nevertheless, so much was he a part of the jungle. He avoided upflung roots and intertwining vines...

He knew in an instant what had happened. A great boa, lying in wait for whatever living thing might pass beneath the tree, had darted down upon him. The coils of the great snake...

This, however, was but little reassuring. Bomba knew the stealth of the cruel beast, as subtle as it was ferocious. Its tawny hide was little discernible from the grasses and sh...

There came the padding of feet and a pushing aside of the bushes, and Bomba could see the outlines of a great body of some member of the four-footed tribe advancing toward him.

The puma and the boy rested for a time, while Polulu licked his wounds, and when Bomba went on again the puma accompanied him for some distance through the jungle.

He returned the scowl of the Indian with a flashing smile that showed all his white teeth, and, beating with his two clenched hands upon his bronzed chest, cried in a loud voice...

The boy recognized her then as the youngest child of the chief, Hondura. He had seen her more than once when he had skirted the village in some of his hunting excursions.

Some sort of incantation had evidently been in progress, as was manifest from the presence of a kettle over the fire in which the medicine man had been stirring his horrid brew....

“The Indians!” panted Bomba, as he slammed the door shut and slipped into place the heavy bar he had fashioned while he was rebuilding the hut. “Nascanora and his head-hunters!...

In the distance could be heard something like the soughing of a great wind. It grew in volume until it swelled into a roar. Then the jungle about the hut was alive with monkeys,...