“By jove! I have got a crocodile after all!” cried Harry, jumping back, as a hideous thing four feet long, and having the same number of legs, and a tail, seemed making towards him. The reis, laughing in a manner most contrary to our notions of the staid impassive Arab, began hammering the creature with a stick, until it lay quiet enough.
“What is it?” asked the captor, approaching cautiously.
“A big lizard,” replied Hassib, “so your learned white men say; ‘alligator lizard’ I heard one call it. But it is really a thing that comes out of an addled crocodile’s egg.”
Harry looked up quickly, but the reis was perfectly grave. And on such occasions he always pretended to believe, whether he did or no. Hassib was quite confident of the correctness of his information, and how could it be disproved, or, for that matter, why should it be?
The sun was now very low on the horizon, and would soon take its sand-bath. Hassib laid his hand on Forsyth’s arm and ducked behind a mound on the edge of the bank. Harry did the same.
“One, two, five, seven,” counted Hassib. Harry peeped, and saw that mystic number of grey crocodiles lying on the island where he had been looking for them.
The nearest was about two hundred yards off. By stalking him along the bank, as he was not quite opposite, he got perhaps thirty yards nearer. As has been said, he was a really first-rate rifle-shot, and the prospects of that crocodile could not be considered rosy.
Scales are hard, but so are conical bullets. Harry took a steady aim at what he had been taught to consider the most vulnerable part get-at-able, and pulled. Crack! Smack! He heard the ball tell as plainly as if it were on an iron target. But the absurd crocodile acted as all the others he had shot at had done: he rolled over into the water and disappeared, and the other six kept him company.
“He is killed! Oh, he is killed!” cried the reis, much excited. “He will float soon, you will see. When they are shot dead their bodies soon float.”
Whether this creature was an exception, or was not shot dead, or was carried down to the cataract before he got to the floating stage, and so came up where no one wanted him, cannot be said. But they saw him no more, and he was numbered among the partridges who have gone away to die, and the rabbits that were hit so hard, but crept away into holes!