The creek emptied into a wide bay on the high bank of which the boys camped. It was part of the Madeira Hammock, the most beautiful native forest they had seen. At daylight a large crocodile was floating on the bay near the camp, but sank out of sight as the campers showed themselves. From the bay the canoeists entered a deep river with high banks on which were growing madeira, wild sapadillo, palms of several kinds and other varieties of trees. In the sides of the high banks at the water line the boys saw holes which they believed to be the caves of crocodiles. In the mouth of one the water was muddied and Dick cut a long pole which he poked into the hole. At first he felt something seize the pole, but could not afterward find the creature. He then took the pole on the bank and thrust it into the ground where he thought the reptile was most likely to be. When he had worked thirty feet back from the bank he felt something move and the next instant Ned, who had stayed in the canoe at the mouth of the cave, was nearly capsized by the rush of a great beast nearly the size of the canoe.
"Why didn't you grab it, Ned? What is the use of my driving game to you, if you let it slip through your fingers?"
"Perhaps you think that was one of the alligator babies you've been nursing. You didn't see the big head with the tusks running out of the top of it."
"No, but I mean to see the next one. It'll be your turn to do the punching while I rope the critter."
"If you had got your rope on that one and held on, you'd be in his cave now, inside the owner's tummy."
The next crocodile was not far away and the hunters saw it crawl into its cave. Dick stood on the bank over the cave and arranged the noose on the end of the harpoon line around the mouth of the cave, while Ned paddled the canoe a few rods down the stream. Dick had the line fast to his wrist, but Ned wouldn't punch it until it had been made fast to a chunk of wood instead.
"What difference does it make?" grumbled Dick. "If the chunk goes overboard I follow it. See?"
Ned hit the crocodile on his first poke and Dick had his hands full from the start. He would have been dragged into the river within a dozen seconds, but for Ned's coming to his aid. The crocodile was as quick as the alligators had been slow.
"If he digs round as fast on land as he does in the water there's goin' to be a circus when we get him out on the bank," said the panting Dick.
"And you wanted to be tied to his mammy by the wrist. This is only an infant. It isn't nine feet long."