"She was never so sacred as she is now, sir, for:
"She's flapping her wings in the crocodile heaven," said Bones, flippantly; "for I'm one of those dead shots—once I draw a bead on an animal——"
"Get out a canoe and set the woodmen to dive for the Green One," said Hamilton to his orderly, for a shot crocodile invariably sinks to the bottom and can only be recovered by diving.
They brought it to the surface, and Hamilton groaned.
"It is M'zooba," he said in resigned exasperation. "Oh, Bones, what an ass you are!"
Bones said nothing, but walked to the stern of the ship and lowered the blue ensign to half-mast—a piece of impertinence which Hamilton did not discover till a long time afterwards.
Now whatever might be the desire or wish of Hamilton, and however much he might on ordinary occasions depend upon the loyalty of his warders and his men, in this matter of the green crocodile he was entirely at their mercy, for he could not call them together asking them to speak no death of the Green One without magnifying the importance of Lieutenant Tibbetts' rash act. The only attitude he could adopt was to treat the Green One and her untimely end as something which was in the day's work neither to be lamented nor acclaimed, and when, at the first village, a doleful deputation, comprising a worried chief and a sulky witch doctor, called upon him to bemoan the tragedy, he treated the matter with great joviality.
"For what is a crocodile more or less in this river?" he asked.
"Lord, this was no crocodile," said the witch doctor, "but a very reverend ghost, and it has been our Ju-ju for many years, bringing us good crops and fair weather for our goodness, and has eaten up all the devils and sickness which came to our villages. Now it is gone nothing but ill fortune can come to us."
"Bugobo," said Hamilton, "you talk like a foolish one, for how may a crocodile who does not leave the water, and moreover is evil and old, a stealer of women and children and dangerous to your goats, how can this thing bring good fortune to any people?"