The Coconino weekly sun., 1895-02-28


 monster of the deep, armored with hideous bony scales, in mortal combat with some leviathan that has crossed its path! Nor the captain still shout. ing, pale and trembling. No! Not combatl The leviathan is not fighting It is struggling to escape! Mighty as it is, it is but prey of the awful serpent like sparrow swooped down upon by hawk! It is whale-a whale the like in size of which I've never seen in all my forty years of sailing on the salty seas! His girth lead line fifty fathoms long would scarcely once go round, and yet the serpent is coiled aboutft full a score of times! What seemed to be spouting geysers from the sea arc but parts of the serpent, this one now rear ing aloft the monsters fearful head; that one now being his convoluting ex- tremity, tipped with an awful barb! They rise and fall by the terrible i'm pulse of the serpeDt's assault upon the whale, which he spins and whirls and churns in the deep as a mill wheel might be spun by the rush of impelling waters! The black objects are other whales, agitated and terror-stricken spectators of their mighty fellows deadly environment! Harkr the cap tain still with the glass to his eye, and growing paler and paler.
 Tt was not necessary for us to hcark- en. A deaf man could almost havs heard the sounds that came to us over the sea from the scene of that awful contest. Boom! boom! boom! Like tho hoarse intonations of a saluting can non.
 "'By the rusty key of Davy Jones' locker! the captain shouted. The aw- ful compress of that serpent's coil has bust the whale! Three times the great leviathan's tremendous bulk has bust, with noise like thunder! And now they sink-thc horrible serpent has gone below-to gorge his mighty plum derp
 "The glass fell from the captains hand. Seasoned as he was by forty years atloat, and familiar with the ap- palling things the boundless ocean breeds, he fainted dead away upon the deck. In tho excitement following the captains collapse all save the fetch- ing of him to was forgotten, and when at last he was out of his swoon and somewhat himself again the whales that had heen terror-stricIcn witnesses of the sea serpent's capture of their mate had disappeared. This chagrined the captain. According to his descrip- tion of them, any one of these whales would have been an unheard-of prize. But they had slipped away and were out of sight.
 "'Well chase themr said the cap tain. I will not leave these mysterious seas until kill whale'
 "So we sailed in the presumed wake of the whales. Two days we sailed. Not sight or trace of whale. Then the captain changed his course and sailed sou'west. The third day we sighted something. At first sight and for long time as we approached 1t we took it for the projecting summit of coral reef, formed like fattened pyramid and covering many yards of the oceans surface. In height it rose, as it seemed to me, almost to the eleva- tion of our Inainmast. We would have sailed by it without comment or fur ther thought, but just as our course brought about a hundred feet aport there was sudden movement in the mass. It began to unfold, and to our horror we saw the frightful head of the sea serpent rear itself and shoot upward until the fierce eyes of the mendous height. Before the captain could shout an order the serpent sank like falling meteor into the sea, and with a roaring hiss rushed toward our vessel, its monstrous head held high above the water, it's jaws apart like the opening to some great cavern, its eyes glaring fire.
 ITO your axesr shouted the captain.
 "Every man of us seized an ax. The sea monster quickly covered the space between where he lay and our vessel, and thrust his horrible head over the 5 ull W dlC. ho uih oc lAC oSoppCu dS 1T brought up by something that held him back. And something did. Away out on the water, where his middle was, his body loomed up like water-logged wreck. But we had no time to wonder 1t that. It was my privilege to strike the awful serpent the first blow. My ax sank to the helve in his back. Quick Iy every sailor followed with telling blows, until we hacked and hewed the into his death throes. He died hard. His struggles shook the ship until she groaned and creaked. But we killed him. I do not hesitate to say, though, that if itahad not been for that great hulking thing that held him handicapped amidships, so to speak, the chances are that he would never have fallen victim to our fury. think, we would have been engulfed, perhaps ship and all, by the terrible monster. After we had slain the serpent boat was manned and rowed out to see what the looming mass was that had indirectly encom- passed his destruction. We chopped the floating carcass of the dead sea open. Lo! there was the tre- mendous whale the captain had de-