There are two crocodile incidents well-known to those whom time has now made old hands, but believed by no one else; even in the day of their happening they divided men into believers and unbelievers. The one was of ‘Mad’ Owen—only mad, because utterly reckless—riding through Komati Drift one moonlight night alone and unarmed, who, riding, found his horse brought to a stop, plunging, kicking and struggling on the sand bank in mid-stream where the water was not waist deep. Owen looking back saw that a crocodile had his horse by the leg. All he had was a leaded hunting-crop, but, jumping into the water he laid on so vigorously that the crocodile made off, and Owen remounted and rode out.
There are many who say that it is not true—that it cannot be true; for no man would do it. But there are others who have an open mind, because they knew Owen—Mad Owen, who for a wager bandaged his horse’s eyes and galloped him over a twenty foot bank headlong into the Jew’s Hole in Lydenburg; Owen, who when driving four young horses in a Cape cart flung the reins away and whipped up the team, bellowing with laughter, because his nervous companion said he had never been upset and did not want to be; Owen, who— But too many things rise up that earned him his title and blow the ‘impossible’ to the winds.
Mad Owen deserves a book to himself; but here is my little testimony on his behalf, given shamefaced at the thought of how he would roar to think it needed.
I crossed that same drift one evening and on riding up the bank to Furley’s store saw a horse standing in a dejected attitude with one hind leg clothed in ‘trowsers’ made of sacking and held up by a suspender ingeniously fastened across his back.
During the evening something reminded me of the horse, and I asked a question; and the end of Furley’s answer was, “They say it’s all a yarn about ‘horsewhipping’ a crocodile: all we know is that one night, a week ago, he turned up here dripping wet, and after having a drink told us the yarn. He had the leaded hunting-crop in his hand; and that’s the horse he was riding. You can make what you like of it. We’ve been doctoring the horse ever since, but I doubt if it will pull through!”
I have no doubt about the incident. Owen did not invent: he had no need to; and Furley himself was no mean judge of crocodiles and men. Furley kept a ferry boat for the use of natives and others when the river was up, at half a crown a trip. The business ran itself and went strong during the summer floods, but in winter when the river was low and fordable it needed pushing; and then Furley’s boatman, an intelligent native, would loiter about the drift and interest travellers in his crocodile stories, and if they proved over-confident or sceptical, would manoeuvre them a little way down stream where, from the bank, they would usually see a big crocodile sunning himself on a sand spit below the drift. The boys always took the boat. One day some police entered the store and joyously announced that they had got him—“bagged the old villain at last!”; and Furley dropped on a sack of mealies groaning out “Glory, Boys! The ferry’s ruined. Why, I’ve preserved him for years!”
The other crocodile incident concerns “Lying Tom”—brave merry-faced blue-eyed Tom; bubbling with good humour; overflowing with kindness; and full of the wildest yarns, always good and amusing, but so steep that they made the most case-hardened draw a long breath.
The name Lying Tom was understood and accepted by every one in the place, barring Tom himself; for, oddly enough, there was another Tom of the same surname, but no relation, and once when his name cropped up I heard the real Simon Pure refer to him as “my namesake—the chap they call Lying Tom.” To the day of his death Tom believed that it was the other Tom who was esteemed the liar.
Tom was a prospector who ‘came in’ occasionally for supplies or licences; and there came a day when Barberton was convulsed by Lying Tom’s latest.
He had been walking along the bank of the Crocodile River, and on hearing screams ran down just in time to see a kaffir woman with a child on her back dragged off through the shallow water by a crocodile. Tom ran in to help—“I kicked the dashed thing on the head and in the eyes,” he said, “and punched its ribs and then grabbed the bucket that the woman had in her hand and hammered the blamed thing over the head till it let go. By Jimminy, Boys, the woman was in a mess: never saw any one in such a fright!”