Rokens addressed his question to the captain, but Phil Briant, who had just succeeded in getting his pipe to draw beautifully, answered instead.
“Och! no,” said he; “that’s not the way to pronounce it at all, at all. It’s a huppi-puppi-puttimus.”
“I dun know,” said Rokens, shaking his head gravely; “it appears to me there’s too many huppi puppies in that word.”
This debate caused Ailie infinite amusement, for she experienced considerable difficulty herself in pronouncing that name, and had a very truthful picture of the hippopotamus hanging at that moment in her room at home.
“Isn’t Tim Rokens very funny, papa?” she remarked in a whisper, looking up in her father’s face.
“Hush! my pet, and look yonder. There is something funnier, if I mistake not.”
He pointed, as he spoke, to a ripple in the water on the opposite side of the river, close under a bank which was clothed with rank, broad-leaved, and sedgy vegetation. In a few seconds a large crocodile put up its head, not farther off than twenty yards from the canoe, which apparently it did not see, and opening its tremendous jaws, afforded the travellers a splendid view of its teeth and throat. Briant afterwards asserted that he could see down its throat, and could almost tell what it had had for dinner!
“Plaze, sir, may I shoot him?” cried Briant, seizing his loaded musket, and looking towards the captain for permission.
“It’s of no use while in that position,” remarked the trader, who regarded the hideous-looking monster with the calm unconcern of a man accustomed to such sights.
“You may try;” said the captain with a grin. Almost before the words had left his lips, Phil took a rapid aim and fired. At the same identical moment the crocodile shut his jaws with a snap, as if he had an intuitive perception that something uneatable was coming. The bullet consequently hit his forehead, off which it glanced as if it had struck a plate of cast-iron. The reptile gave a wabble, expressive of lazy surprise, and sank slowly back into the slimy water.