“No!”
“Very well!” said the officer. “In that case, we shall have to shoot it down!”
“Shoot it up if you want to!” said the alligators.
And the boat returned to the steamer.
But now, this mouse-gray steamboat was not an ordinary steamboat: it was a warship, with armor plate and terribly powerful guns. The old alligator who had made the trip to the river mouth suddenly remembered, and just in time to shout to the other alligators: “Duck for your lives! Duck! She’s going to shoot! Keep down deep under water.”
The alligators dived all at the same time, and headed for the shore, where they halted, keeping all their bodies out of sight except for their noses and their eyes. A great cloud of flame and smoke burst from the vessel’s side, followed by a deafening report. An immense solid shot hurtled through the air and struck the dam exactly in the middle. Two or three tree trunks were cut away into splinters and drifted off downstream. Another shot, a third, and finally a fourth, each tearing a great hole in the dam. Finally the piles were entirely destroyed; not a tree, not a splinter, not a piece of bark, was left; and the alligators, still sitting with their eyes and noses just out of water, saw the warship come steaming by and blowing its whistle in derision at them.
Then the alligators came out on the bank and held a council of war. “Our dam was not strong enough,” said they; “we must make a new and much thicker one.”
So they worked again all that afternoon and night, cutting down the very biggest trees they could find, and making a much better dam than they had built before. When the gunboat appeared the next day, they were sleeping soundly and had to hurry to get behind the piles of the dam by the time the rowboat arrived there.
“Hey, alligators!” called the same officer.
“See who’s here again!” said the alligators, jeeringly.