BY FRANK SAVILE

THE smoking-room steward yawned his despair. The card parties had broken up half an hour before, nightcap drinks had been ordered, tumblers had been emptied, and half a dozen men had risen to their feet with “Good night” upon their lips. It looked as if the long-suffering attendant were to be allowed a real six hours’ sleep below.

And then a single word—“fishing”—had changed all these bright prospects in the twinkling of an eye. The globe-trotting Englishman, Mathers, was vaunting the fifty-six-pound salmon he had caught in the Sands River, British Columbia. It seemed that not a man in the room could take to his bed in peace till he had confuted the boaster from stores of personal experience. Fresh cigars were lit, tumblers were refilled, and story climbed upon story in unctuous mendacity.

Muller, the German bagman, bumbled tales of Baltic sturgeon that would make two bites of the British Columbian salmon if they encountered them after breakfast time; Morehead, fresh from Florida, smiled superiorly as he told of one-hundred-and-fifty-pound tarpon, caught with a line and rod, of the weight of a walking-cane; Rivaz, the creole, asked what was the matter with a two-hundred-weight tuna that it should score second place to what was nothing more than a glorified herring? Across the clouds of smoke romance answered to romance; falsehood was fought with its own weapons.

Finally Morehead, abandoning his earliest illustration, harked back to the land from which it was drawn. Alligators—had any one of them enjoyed the sport of hanging a looped line over an alligator run, and opening a manhole through the earth upon their lairs? That was fishing if you liked, with the odds upon the fish! Till you had joined in the tug which yanked a fighting saurian ashore you didn’t know what human muscles could stand—you might go shark-fishing every day of your life, and miss learning it.

The suddenness of the topic left him, for the moment, master of the field. Professional liars, hurriedly reviewing their conversational equipments, found themselves with no better weapon than an already over-tempered imagination. None of them had been in Florida—none could supply the substratum of fact which alone is a true foundation for convincing fiction.

Then a new voice shattered the periods of Morehead’s triumph. In the corner, with one foot banked against the table and the other stretched across the lounge, sat a long and lanky graybeard, his extended limbs giving him something of the effect of a pair of human compasses. So far he had added nothing to the conversation.

“Say, now, my dear sir,” he drawled plaintively, “you know you have not got any real alligators in Florida.”

The young man’s face grew purple.

“Not got any!” he blared. “Not got any!”

“Not to call alligators!” persisted the veteran complacently. “What, now, would be your idea of the length, breadth and jaw-capacity of one of your little pets?”

The youth drew a calculating breath and eyed his questioner narrowly.

“I assisted, a short time back, to capture one eighteen feet long,” he lied coldly. The man on the lounge accepted the statement with a patronizing little nod.

“There now!” he agreed. “It just bears out what I say. Nowadays there aren’t any of a size to call alligators. When I was in Florida, it might be forty or it might be fifty years ago, that kind of small fry were reckoned in among the lizards. When we went hunting what the New York manufacturers call crocodile leather, anything less than four fathoms from tail-tip to smile we shouldered out of the way. One of thirty feet, I allow, we considered a circumstance.”

A murmur rustled up from the assembly. Even the steward’s unconscious grimace spoke of incredulity.

“Yes,” continued the old man pleasantly. “I see your eyebrows rise, but that won’t prevent my assuring you that my recollections don’t stop there. For over a year I had the personal acquaintance of one that measured from end to end not a single inch less than twelve slimy yards. But that,” he allowed generously, “was not in Florida.”

“Barnum’s Museum?” suggested Morehead contemptuously, and the listeners grinned. The veteran was not put out.

“No,” he contradicted, “not even in the United States. Yet, at the same time, not so far from home. In Cuba—to be explicit.”

There was a shout of derision. Not less than six of those present had been volunteers in the war.

“Cuba!” they bawled in chorus. “There isn’t a crocodile in the island that would crowd a bathtub!” added Morehead defiantly.

The graybeard eyed them serenely.

“Of course,” he said, with a humble note of interrogation, “you’re posted—you know every inch of the country from Baracoa to Corrientes?”

Morehead moved a little restlessly.

“I was three months around Santiago with my regiment,” said he.

“And spent every spare second examining the creeks, I don’t doubt,” said the other cheerfully. “My boy,” he went on, “I had been five years in the country before you began to attend kindergarten. In those days the fame of the Blique Bayou alligator was known to every soul within a hundred miles of Guantanama. I don’t mind allowing that the name of Everett P. Banks—which is what I’m called when I’m at home, gentlemen—was a good deal in men’s mouths about the same time. We were much mixed up together, one way or another, that astounding beast and I.”

The steward leaned his head upon his palms, and swore gently beneath his breath. He told himself that this evil old man was about to knock another half-hour off the night’s rest. He recognized in the gray eyes a triumphant light—the gleam that illumines the face of the raconteur whose audience is assured.

Morehead was still dissatisfied.

“Blique Bayou?” he repeated superciliously. “Blique Bayou?”

Banks nodded with an indulgent air.

“On the map it appears as the San Antonio River,” he explained, “and it flows into the sea about a mile to the west of the Buena Esperanza Mining Company’s settlement. As it was notorious that Emil Blique, the West Indian, owned all the shares, the hill that was topped by the shafting was called Blique Mountain, and the creek and swamp around it Blique Bayou. For five years I was manager of the whole outfit. And a knock-kneed crowd they were,” he added reminiscently.

Mathers interrupted. It looked as if the narrative were going to jump the tracks to be wrecked on outside issues.

“The alligator,” he insisted. “We want the tale of the alligator!”

The old man stared at him in gentle surprise.

“You wouldn’t keep a man of my age out of his berth to tell you yarns thirty years old?” he deprecated.

“We would,” said Mathers determinedly. “What’s yours?”

Startled out of his equanimity, the ancient allowed that so far he had encountered nothing to abash whisky—plain. But as for the story at that time of night—well, well, they needn’t make all that noise. If it had to be done he supposed he had better get to it as quickly as possible. He paused, took a gulp at the tumbler the steward placed before him, and let a meditative glance dwell upon Morehead, who had made a motion to rise. Catching his eye, the Floridian suddenly abandoned his purpose, and sat down in a pose of exasperated resignation.

“It was somewhere about ’81—or it might be ’82,” began the old man, anchoring his gaze mildly upon Morehead’s uncompromising features, “that I landed at Santiago from Savannah, with a letter in my pocket from my late employer, George S. Gage, to SeÑor Emil Blique, Buena Esperanza; the letter and myself being respectively part answers to a wild telegram that my boss had received ten days before. The West Indian had cabled that his manager had died of yellow fever, and that he was alone with nothing but creole help to drive the congregation of hard-shell niggers and dagos that he paid to grub manganese from the bowels of the earth.

“He wanted a man, he said, with a knowledge of mining and with two working fists. He laid particular stress upon the second qualification, and offered such a one three hundred dollars a month to come at the earliest opportunity.

“Gage told me that if I’d the spirit of a louse I’d run along and take it. Otherwise, he said, he’d offer it to Altsheler, the under manager, who was a wicked man behind a pistol, but with no kind of idea of using four fingers and a thumb when the gun got lost. That’s a terrible fault among dagos. They are frightened of a knock-down blow, because they don’t understand it. But when you start gunning among them—well, they can gun and knife themselves—some.

“You mightn’t think it, gentlemen, but in those days I’d a fist like a ham, and I concluded, after consideration, that the job was built for my particular talents and not for Altsheler’s. Ten days after that telegram arrived I was bumping along the trail to Blique Mountain, wondering just how hard those three hundred dollars would be to collect at the end of every four weeks.

“I needn’t have troubled. For a Jamaican, old Emil was as straight a man as I have ever known. His cheque was good money every time I cashed it, and, when I’d got the hang of the business, fairly easy earned. During the first fortnight I filled an eye for two mine hands per diem, and by the end of that time the crowd began to understand just where their best interest lay. They reasoned it out that they’d have to do as they were told, and after that things went like clockwork. When I’d got them really tame, indeed, I found that I could slack off in the afternoons when old man Blique was moving about himself, and so I looked around for relaxation. Like all of you, I was something of a fisherman.

“Naturally, I turned my steps toward the bayou, and it was there that I made the acquaintance of Pedro Garsia, Concepcion, his son, and the other member of the family, as I must call him, for from every point of view, he was treated like a relation. I allude to my friend Joaquin el Legardo—Jimmy the Alligator, in the vernacular—and he, I repeat, was every inch of thirty-six feet long. I dare say he was a hundred and fifty years old, and he led a more or less blameless existence in the swamp and stream adjacent to the Garsia bungalow.

“At first, though, it looked as if our relations might be strained. I’d got down to the bank, fitted up my rod and cast a speculative lump of frog’s flesh into the water just to see if anything sizeable was on the move. No sooner had I made the cast than there was a boil and a rush ’way out in midstream, and an ugly dun snout bobbed above the surface and took down my bait and half my line before I realized what was happening. It didn’t take me long to understand. I saw the great jaws open and champ viciously on the good catgut that was tangled in the yellow teeth, and I said a wicked word. Also I drew my revolver. Before I’d got it cocked I heard a terrible uproar from behind.

“An old man, with silver-white hair hanging over a chocolate-brown face, was running toward me, shouting as if he’d break a blood vessel.

“‘No shoot!’ he bawled, ‘no shoot!’ and he waved his arms with some of the most complete gesticulations I have ever witnessed. I put down my pistol and waited till he arrived panting.

“He was too much out of breath to say much at first, but what he did manage to whisper was to the point. ‘Bueno legardo—bueno,’ he repeated, pointing to the brute that was playing cat’s-cradle with my fishing line, and then, tapping the butt of my revolver, ‘no shoot—no!’

“I can tell you I was mystified, for the idea of a good alligator, as he kept calling it, was outside the pale of my experiences. I told him so. But he nodded and beckoned and led me down the bank a couple of hundred yards till we were opposite his house. There I found a rope stretched between two stumps across the river, with a loop running on it, and this last was lashed to the bow of a pirogue.

“‘This mine,’ he explained, smiling. ‘This what you call a ferry.’ I looked at the boat. Then I remembered that coming up from Santiago the road had circled widely. Blique Mountain had been in sight a good hour before we reached it and my driver had made me understand that we were avoiding the river. This was evidently the short cut for foot travelers.

“‘If this is the ferry, why in the name of gracious don’t you let me fill that old pirate with lead?’ I asked, as the brute floated comfortably by. ‘Not that he’d mind,’ I added, as I realized the size of him, ‘but you should get a howitzer and pump a six-pound ball through him. Some day, when your catboat’s full of people, he’ll upset it and fill his larder for a fortnight.’

“The old man smiled agreeably and put his head on one side like a magpie. He cocked me a comical look out of the corner of his eye.

‘This river not deep,’ he explained glibly. ‘This what you call ford one time,’ and he pointed toward the eddies that swirled between us and the opposite bank. I could see that they were running over shallows nowhere more than four feet deep. And at that the old chap toddled into the house and reappeared with a basket load of decaying lizard flesh. He came close to me and gave me a little nudge.

“‘Ford one time,’ he repeated, taking a lump of offal and tossing it into the stream. Then he gave me another nudge, and grinned. ‘Joaquin—’ he drew my attention to the dun snout that came floating down upon the bait—‘Joaquin make it ferry!’

“I gave him one look, and he answered me with a grimace that would have done credit to an idol. Then I sat down and laughed and laughed till I was sore. The originality of it! The old scoundrel was positively and actually maintaining his private alligator to put the fear of death upon the niggers and mulattos that used the short cut into the town, and was reaping a harvest of ferry dues over a four-foot deep river!

“He watched me, as I shouted, quite politely, and when I’d had my laugh out insisted on escorting me into his house and offering me a glass of aguardiente. While I was sipping it he was rummaging among his litter and finally produced me a line in the place of the one that Joaquin had snatched. He insisted on binding it on to my reel, and then, in his broken English, began to explain just where the best fishing stands could be found along the banks. And he didn’t stop a-telling. He took me out when the sun got lower and gave me a few practical hints upon the spot. He laid himself out to be agreeable, and at the end of a couple of hours we were as thick as thieves.

“When we got back to the shanty we found a thick, squat, low-browed young man smoking a cigarette on the veranda. The old man introduced him as his son, Concepcion. The youth bowed, smirked and expressed his sense of the honor in perfect English, yet somehow I didn’t take to him as I had done to his parent. He had the same magpie way of looking at you as his father had, but with a difference. The old man did it with a laugh in his eye: the young one furtively, shiftily and without the ghost of a smile.

“It came about that for the next twelve months I was thrown a good deal into the company of the Garsias. They lived openly on the earnings of their ferry, but I suspected that they made a little by selling aguardiente to my dagos and niggers. But they knew when to stop—they never sent one of my crowd back so’s he couldn’t take his spell the day after a carouse, and anything short of that I winked at.

“Old man Blique was not a conversationalist, and the two at the bungalow were practically my only company for days together. And when they were out of the way I got into the habit of regarding even Joaquin as a sort of companion. I got to know his haunts, and where a newcomer would have seen nothing but an ugly log, half buried in the mud, I could recognize the upper half of the alligator’s countenance and his little, straight, slit eyes winking at me most benevolent.

“And yet he was the one that put an end to all this simplicity and loving kindness. I don’t know if the fish supply in the river grew short. Perhaps in his old age he developed epicurean tastes. But nasty stories suddenly began to come in. Fowls went, pigs were missed and never heard of again, a couple of steers disappeared from an estancia higher up the river, and a mare of Emil’s was robbed of her colt and pervaded the banks of the bayou for weeks, neighing like a lost soul. Joaquin grew to be the most unpopular personage in the neighborhood.

“The worst, however, was to come. Red Rambo, the head man of a gang that worked Number 44 level, and a mulatto went spreeing off to Santiago one fine evening before a Saint’s Day. The next afternoon, late, as I was fishing, he appeared on the opposite bank, evidently full up, calling to Pedro to fetch him and his mates across. The moment the old man had got the pirogue against the far bank Red Rambo started to call him every kind of extortioner and money-sucker, and, seeing that it was from a mulatto to a pure-breed creole, I don’t wonder that the old man got mad. He refused to take the fellow over—told him to cool his blood by walking six miles round.

“Unfortunately Rambo had drunk himself up to the pitch of Dutch obstinacy and Dutch courage. He came splashing into the river, wading after the pirogue and cursing Pedro by every saint in the nigger calendar.

“Some of the low-down half-castes, who’d believe anything, used to declare that Joaquin was the familiar spirit of the Garsia family and was sworn to protect them in this life in return for a note of hand for their souls in the life to come. I could see some of the men in the boat just shivering for Red Rambo as they listened to the insults he was piling upon the old boy, and their shivers were prophetic. For there came a sudden swirl upon the surface of the calm in midstream, and then a little grooving eddy shot toward the mulatto with the rush of a millrace.

“He yelled, tossed up his arms, and made a half-turn toward the shore. Through a long instant I could see his finger-tips quiver against the green of a fern palm opposite. And then he was gone—snatched down from below as suddenly as the pantomime clown drops through the trap in the boards. A little foaming cone of water burst up from the whirl where he disappeared, and long, irregular stains floated away from its crimson centre. But never another sign of Rambo was seen again, either in the water or out of it. Joaquin was both his murderer and his grave!

“In justice to poor old Pedro I must allow that he was the man who took the thing most to heart. He screeched, he gesticulated, he called down curses upon the alligator from all the angels of paradise, and he made as if he would leap into the river and fall upon Joaquin with nothing more than a pocket-knife; in fact, it took all the exertions of the other niggers to keep him from it. They got him ashore at last pretty well demented and fighting like a maniac. He had to be tied to his bed before we durst leave him to himself. When the others had gone jabbering off home I shook my head solemnly at Concepcion.

“‘That means the end of Joaquin,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow I shall get orders from the boss to fill him up with Winchester bullets, and then where’s your ferry?’

“The Spaniard was as pale as milk. He looked away from me to his father foaming upon the bed, and then he gave a queer little high-pitched laugh.

“‘SeÑor Banks,’ he answered, ‘there may be two sides to that question. SeÑor Blique owns the mines, but not the river or the alligator. That dirt-begotten negro brought his fate upon himself.’

“I looked at him narrowly, and noticed that he was ostentatiously and abnormally calm. That’s a bad sign in a creole. They are safer red and roaring. Cold and white they’re malicious.

“‘My dear friend,’ said I politely, ‘there is no law against alligator shooting. Whatever orders I get I shall obey—be sure of that and take a friendly warning. Joaquin can’t stay hereabouts after that bloody exploit—it’s absurd to expect it.’

“He bowed quite pleasantly.

“‘If warnings are in order, seÑor,’ he replied, ‘take one from me. The man that kills Joaquin will not live long to boast of it!’ And at that he drew back the curtain from before the door and gave me a very significant view of the street. I took the hint and, without another word, marched out. And I did it sideways, too. You don’t expose the broad of your back to a man of Concepcion’s singular talents without making sure that he’s leaving his knife in his belt.

“Of course, as I predicted, old Emil was not prepared to stand any nonsense from Pedro Garsia, his son, or Joaquin. Rambo was one of his best foremen. He gave me the strictest orders to take my gun to the alligator the first thing in the morning and to revenge the mulatto if it took all day. I nodded, shrugged my shoulders, and went to bed.

“The first news brought me in the morning was that old Pedro was dead. The shock had brought on brain fever, and the son’s homeopathic treatment of forcing aguardiente down his throat had lifted the fever to the point of delirium. In the night the patient had burst his bonds and broken straight for the river. His son and their nigger servant had been aroused by the noise and had followed.

“They were just about ten seconds too late. The old man stumbled upon the bank and went sprawling half in and half out of the water, his outstretched hand falling upon what the nigger thought was a floating log.

“It wasn’t. For the log split into twin jaws, and, as the other two snatched the poor old fellow up, the open fangs came together just below the unfortunate wretch’s shoulder. It was only a piece of corpse that they carried back into the veranda, while Joaquin went smiling off into midstream to enjoy a most unexpected dessert.

“I considered, of course, that any son with Christian feelings would spare me any further trouble in the matter of the alligator’s death. That, for the sake of commercial advantage, Concepcion would allow his parent to go unrevenged seemed out of the question. I took my Winchester with me as I strolled down to the river merely because I thought he might be too much overcome with grief to have completed his obvious duty, and that I might do him a neighborly turn by forestalling him.

“You can imagine my surprise, then, when I saw, as I turned the corner of the Garsia bungalow, Concepcion, standing alone upon the river bank, the usual basket of offal on the ground beside him, tossing the contents into the water, lump by lump! The alligator was taking them, serenely and regularly, waiting for them with half-open jaws as a lapdog waits for biscuits!

“There are moments when one’s impulses take the reins into their teeth and bolt. I made no sound—I said nothing. I strode silently up behind the man, drew a clear bead upon the brute’s eye and sent a bullet plumb into his wicked brain. And as he ripped out of the water and rolled over in his agony I fired another cartridge at the junction of his forearm and body, and that was the end of his floundering. He sank like a lump of lead.

“The Spaniard gave a yell as I fired the first time. I brought my rifle down from the second shot to see him springing straight at me. I pulled him up short. With the butt at my hip and the muzzle pointing straight at his chest, I made him understand just what to expect if he came a step nearer. He halted five yards away—panting.

“For ten seconds we two stood there, each glaring into the other’s face, and if the light of hell ever burns in a man’s eyes, I saw it so burning in the eyes of Concepcion Garsia. His shirt was open at the neck—I could watch the drumming of his heart within his ribs!

“And then the tenseness of his limbs gave. He seemed to fall in upon himself. He just gasped one threatening word—‘MaÑana!’ (tomorrow!)—turned upon his heel and staggered off toward his house like a drunken man! I did not see him again for a fortnight.

“Of course, after that, the fact that there was a strain of madness in the Garsia family didn’t seem to me open to doubt. And, pondering the question, I determined that I must be very much upon my guard whenever I visited the ferry. My fishing excursions I gave up entirely and I wore my six-shooter night and day. No—with Concepcion I was taking no risks.

“That same evening Joaquin’s carcass floated up upon a sandbank a hundred yards below the bungalow. The next morning it was gone. The bush behind the bank was trampled and bloodstained, and the niggers began to whisper. They told me, in confidence, that the Spaniard had dug his heart out to make a fetich of and that I was doomed to many lingering torments. Naturally, I took small notice of that sort of thing.

“The hands, now that the ferry had become a ford again, went much more frequently down to Santiago, and it was not long before I heard that Concepcion had been seen there. But his bungalow was closed, his nigger had been sent about his business, and the weeds began to fill his garden, as weeds do in tropical countries alone. At the end of a couple of weeks I began to believe that we had seen the last of SeÑor Concepcion.

“And then a thing happened that appeared to be no less than a miracle. One evening, less than half an hour after a score of the hands had set out to spend the next day’s fiesta in the town, nineteen of them were back in my veranda, yelling, screeching that Joaquin was returned—back and playing his old tricks again! He had risen in the midst of them as they forded the stream and had taken down Tome, a quadroon pickman, exactly as he had taken down Red Rambo less than a month before.

“Of course, I didn’t believe them. I had seen my bullets go home into Joaquin’s brain and heart and I opined that Tome, for the joke of the thing, had dived with a bit of a splutter and was probably laughing himself into convulsions at the success of the trick. I put this view of the case to the others mildly.

“They didn’t seem to have breath enough to pour all the contempt they felt upon the idea. ‘Dived! Joking!’ He was pulled down, screaming, they declared—they saw the jaws close on him—there wasn’t one of them five yards from him when he was taken!

“I shrugged my shoulders, took my rifle and went back with them to the river bank. You can just figure my astonishment when a dun snout, as like the late Joaquin’s as one pea is like another, cut a lazy ripple across the surface as it went sliding out from the bank into midstream! And the boil of his tail showed up ten yards behind his head. I hadn’t believed that there was another such alligator in the wide world!

“These reflections didn’t prevent my rifle-butt coming up to my shoulder. I aimed for a point three inches behind the snout. We heard the bullet thud, but the brute didn’t twitch—he didn’t even close his half-open eye! He just let the water close slowly over his head—so slowly that I found time to empty my magazine at him as he sank. Every one of the five bullets hit his wicked head, and the last glanced off! We knew it by the sound of a second thud among the echoes of the report, while a splash of splintered wood showed on a branch on the opposite side of the stream. Positively and actually, this new Joaquin had a shot-proof skull!

“The niggers were gabbling excitedly about Ju-ju, and such like idolatries, while the dagos were little better. As for me, I sat down upon a stump and took my head in my hands. That two brutes of the same size should appear in the same unimportant little Cuban creek was almost unbelievable—to the superstitious imaginations of the mine hands it could be explained in one way alone. It was debbil-debbil, and they went off home up the hill, starting out of their skins if a bird rustled in the bushes. I was left sitting and wondering.

“At the sound of an opening door some time later I looked up. Concepcion Garsia came sauntering out of the bungalow. I reached for my Winchester.

“He strolled on toward me slowly and complacently, halted a few yards away and bowed. There was a wicked sneer round his thin lips.

“‘Buenos dias, seÑor,’ (Good day) he said as he raised his hat. ‘As you remarked, it is permitted to shoot alligators. That, it appears, does not always include the killing of them,’ and he laughed—his queer high-pitched laugh.

“For the moment I was tongue-tied. The suggestion that an animal whose brain had been shattered by my bullet was still alive was ridiculous, but—well, the ‘but’ was to explain this new brute of the same size in precisely the same spot. I looked Garsia squarely in the eyes.

“‘Do you mean to imply that Joaquin has come back?’ I asked.

“He shrugged his shoulders.

“‘Quien sabe—who knows?’ he answered, with that impudent smile still twisting his lips. ‘What is your own opinion, seÑor?’

“I patted the breech of my rifle.

“‘It is here,’ I said quietly. ‘Joaquin—or another, I shall continue the old treatment, amigo (friend). Half an ounce of lead—at frequent intervals.’

“He laughed again jeeringly, and turned upon his heel.

“‘Continue it, seÑor, continue it,’ he cried over his shoulder, ‘but remember that all things come to an end, even your treatment and perhaps—yourself!’

“The next minute he had slammed the door of his bungalow, and I, not forgetting what an excellent mark for a bullet I was against the yellow of the tinder-dry bush, hastened to put a tree between myself and the shuttered window.

“There is no need to go into details of the next three months. It is sufficient to say that the alligator began a reign of terror at the ford. Horses went—goats, steers, poultry. And the river was almost deserted, for boats were no longer a protection. The planters, who had been accustomed to use the water for a highway between their estancias, gave it up after no less than five pirogues had been charged by the monster, and upset. One of the crew always sank, never to rise again. Strangers using the foot road, and too impatient to wait for the chance of being ferried when the boat was the wrong side, were snatched up. Finally the heavy ferry pirogue itself was capsized, and Manuel, the creole overseer, was lost. With him went, moreover, two thousand pesetas in cash, which he was bringing up from the bank at Santiago for pay day.

“No less than twenty poor wretches went to their account in one way or another in those twelve weeks, and the countryside grew desperate. Enough bullets were showered upon the alligator to sink him by pure weight if they had only stuck in him, but he seemed to mind them no more than peas! I spent a week’s pay in cartridges myself.

“Of course, it is all very well to sit here in this smoking-room and laugh out of court ideas about Ju-ju, fetish work, Whydah and all those sorts of deviltries. They don’t go with ten-thousand-ton boats, electric light and the last special edition Marconigram. But it gets on your nerves if you sit day after day beside a jungle-ringed swamp, listening to all that a couple of hundred niggers have to tell you about the tropical powers of the Evil One. And that there was something mysterious in the business I could swear—something, too, that my instincts told me Concepcion Garsia held the key to. The sight of his face the few times I passed him witnessed to that. There was a glint of triumph in his eye that was simply diabolical. And yet he seldom showed himself. Passers-by used the ferry pirogue as they liked—the centimos that his father used to collect he seemed to think no more about.

“Well, as Concepcion himself remarked, there is an end to everything, even to this story, and it fell to my lot to write finis across it. But it was Providence alone that kept me from being the page and the Spaniard the writer. It was just this way.

“I sat, one evening, on the bank not far from the bungalow, reading. I was keeping an occasional lookout for the alligator, though as the seasonal floods were just falling he hadn’t been seen for two or three weeks. I had my revolver in my belt, more by habit than with any hope of doing him mortal harm with it. Experience had proved that the heaviest rifle bullets didn’t affect him. Just as I finished a chapter a voice hailed me from across the stream.

“I looked up, and recognized SeÑora Barenna, the wife of the planter at the estancia behind Blique Mountain. She was waving her hand, and beckoning to me to bring the pirogue across.

“I was surprised to see her there, for neither she nor her husband used the ferry, as the metaled road to Santiago passed close to their house. But naturally I didn’t wait for explanations at that distance. I ran down, got into the boat and began to pull hand over hand on the guide-rope. The seÑora welcomed me with a smile.

“‘You may well stare,’ she said, as I gave her my hand to help her down the bank, ‘to find me in such a situation. I was driving from the town when our stupid mules took fright at a wild pig that ran between their feet. They swerved, bolted into the bush, smashed a wheel and there I found myself, less than three miles from home by the ford, and six by the road! You may imagine which I chose.’

“‘I’m truly sorry for your misfortune,’ said I, ‘but truly glad of the opportunity of doing you a service,’ for Spanish ladies expect this sort of thing and I began to collect my ideas for a further succession of compliments. I never had a chance to frame them, for the pirogue, which was in midstream again by now, quivered with a tremendous shock. It was lifted half out of the water!

“The next instant it began to rock from side to side, broke from the loop which held it to the guide-rope, and finally upset. The seÑora screamed, and both she and I instinctively grasped the strands above our heads. The boat floated on its side from beneath our feet!

“She was hanging by her hands alone. I swung up my feet, got a good purchase by crooking my knee, and so, freeing one arm, hauled her up by the waist beside me.

“Fortunately, she was an active woman, and she kept her presence of mind. I shouted to her to unfasten the shoulder-shawl she wore, and to fasten it over the rope and around her waist. She had done it in less time than it takes to tell of it, but as she did it my heart jumped into my mouth. Our combined weights amounted to more than the rope had been stayed up to bear. The poles to which it was lashed at each end slanted. We dipped till, owing to the height of the flood, we swung a bare six inches above the surface! And, of course, I had a very good idea of what had upset the boat!

“I had not to wait long. There was a boil of the eddies not ten yards away and the familiar dun snout lifted and showed the upper half of an open jaw. The brute made a bee-line for the bait that hung so attractively at his mercy.

“SeÑora Barenna’s shriek was piercing. As for me—well, I spoke before of the sudden way in which an impulse masters one. I saw in an instant that it was a case of two or one, and a sort of frenzy of rage seized upon me. With a curse I flung myself down upon the brute’s head, feeling with my thumbs for his eyes, while, released from my weight, the rope jerked the seÑora up six feet into safety.

“The next few seconds were a sort of disconnected nightmare. The water closed over my head, the great jaws worked beneath my hands, and then a blow struck me on the chest, exactly over the book that I had placed in my breast-pocket a minute or two before.

“At times like those one’s reason is not in the very best working order, but even then I was quite capable of recognizing that the blow could not have been dealt by an alligator’s clumsy limbs. And my legs and feet, too, instead of meeting the resistance of the brute’s back, were sprawled along nothing more solid than a twenty-foot pole!

“My hand gripped my revolver from my belt, searched with it aimlessly downward and sideways, and blundered against what I felt to be a living body. At the same time the blow was repeated, but not quite in the same place. The point of an edged weapon slipped across the smooth cover of the book and gashed into my ribs. At that I pulled the trigger!

“And many a time since have I thanked Providence for the man that invented brass-drawn, water-tight cartridges. For as I fired there was a great bubbling rush from the explosion that rocked me over, while the huge head below me heaved violently. Like a leaping salmon it burst with me above the surface!

“The flood caught us, gripped us, and whirled us away together, to fling us up upon a shallow bank of mud. And as I struggled to my feet I looked down upon Concepcion’s dead body, a wound gaping in it from my bullet, while beside him was stranded a great sheet-iron shell, floated with leathern bags and surmounted with the stuffed head of old Joaquin! Behind it stretched a pole ornamented with the tip of the same animal’s tail!

“Well, gentlemen, I don’t know that there is much more to add. After I had climbed along the rope and dragged SeÑora Barenna into safety I kicked open the door of the bungalow and left her there, while I hurried up to the works for help. But before I sent old Emil and his housekeeper down with cordials, and so forth, I got the old man’s permission to knock the hands off at once. I had my reasons.

“I lined those superstitious fools along the mud-bank before that sham scaffolding of an alligator, and the sermon I preached them on the follies of Ju-ju ought to have converted them then and there. But the results were entirely contrary to my expectations. For when, some years later, after I had left old Emil, I returned for a short visit to the Barennas, who were always my grateful friends, I found Joaquin’s head hung in their veranda.

“A servant who did not know me saw me looking at it.

“‘That American debbil-debbil,’ he explained politely, and pointed to the little brass plate his master had had stuck upon it with an inscription setting forth that I had shot the brute on such and such a date. ‘Him name Banks,’ he added, ‘and great big Ju-ju. Nigger boy say prayers to him ebry night!’”