“It won’t take long to tell. It wasn’t much. The shacks were of pine trees, split, and you can bet I didn’t bother the insides o’ them. They were the filthiest holes I evah looked into. Some of ’em had grass hammocks an’ that was about all except piles o’ deer skins, gourds, a few tools o’ bone and wood, some old bows and long wicked lookin’ arrows. The cookin’ places were outside the houses, but theah weren’t any iron pots or pans. Theah was one oven made out of a kind of ground shell an’ a big wooden trough, an’ a club to mash co’n.
“But it’s a cinch they didn’t come theah yesterday. The top o’ that island was packed as ha’d as a street. An’ all ’round the edge o’ the ha’d paht there were places wheah othah shacks had stood. Between these and the canal—talk about your dirty alleys! Down neah the watah, you could walk on bones—mostly they seemed alligatah bones. Ain’t no doubt,” continued Tom in a pitying voice, “that tribe or paht of a tribe, lives on alligatahs.”
“Maybe snakes,” suggested Bob.
“Don’t you believe they eat snakes,” exclaimed Tom. “Wait till I tell you. Anyway, it was the dirtiest, creepiest, darkest, lonesomest place, I was evah in. What began to give me the real shivahs was what I saw mongst those ’gatah skeletons. If I saw one, I saw a hundred great big, fat rattlahs, and every one a diamond back. Well, they wasn’t botherin’ me, so I began takin’ pictahs. I took ’em in all directions. Then I went back up into the ‘city.’ Theah I come on what started old ‘Billy Bowlegs’ story—the ‘Sacred Alligatah.’”
[CHAPTER XX]
TOM’S STORY AND THE END
“Theah was a pen on one side of the island that I hadn’t looked in because I thought it meant pigs. When I got to thinkin’, I knew it wasn’t pigs. So I went to have a look. Did you evah heah of an alligatah twenty feet long?” asked Tom.
“I don’t know anything about ’em,” responded Bob. “But I thought fourteen feet was pretty fair for size.”
Tom shook his head, and went on.