“There is no need to go into details of the next three months. It is sufficient to say that the alligator began a reign of terror at the ford. Horses went—goats, steers, poultry. And the river was almost deserted, for boats were no longer a protection. The planters, who had been accustomed to use the water for a highway between their estancias, gave it up after no less than five pirogues had been charged by the monster, and upset. One of the crew always sank, never to rise again. Strangers using the foot road, and too impatient to wait for the chance of being ferried when the boat was the wrong side, were snatched up. Finally the heavy ferry pirogue itself was capsized, and Manuel, the creole overseer, was lost. With him went, moreover, two thousand pesetas in cash, which he was bringing up from the bank at Santiago for pay day.
“No less than twenty poor wretches went to their account in one way or another in those twelve weeks, and the countryside grew desperate. Enough bullets were showered upon the alligator to sink him by pure weight if they had only stuck in him, but he seemed to mind them no more than peas! I spent a week’s pay in cartridges myself.
“Of course, it is all very well to sit here in this smoking-room and laugh out of court ideas about Ju-ju, fetish work, Whydah and all those sorts of deviltries. They don’t go with ten-thousand-ton boats, electric light and the last special edition Marconigram. But it gets on your nerves if you sit day after day beside a jungle-ringed swamp, listening to all that a couple of hundred niggers have to tell you about the tropical powers of the Evil One. And that there was something mysterious in the business I could swear—something, too, that my instincts told me Concepcion Garsia held the key to. The sight of his face the few times I passed him witnessed to that. There was a glint of triumph in his eye that was simply diabolical. And yet he seldom showed himself. Passers-by used the ferry pirogue as they liked—the centimos that his father used to collect he seemed to think no more about.
“Well, as Concepcion himself remarked, there is an end to everything, even to this story, and it fell to my lot to write finis across it. But it was Providence alone that kept me from being the page and the Spaniard the writer. It was just this way.
“I sat, one evening, on the bank not far from the bungalow, reading. I was keeping an occasional lookout for the alligator, though as the seasonal floods were just falling he hadn’t been seen for two or three weeks. I had my revolver in my belt, more by habit than with any hope of doing him mortal harm with it. Experience had proved that the heaviest rifle bullets didn’t affect him. Just as I finished a chapter a voice hailed me from across the stream.
“I looked up, and recognized Señora Barenna, the wife of the planter at the estancia behind Blique Mountain. She was waving her hand, and beckoning to me to bring the pirogue across.
“I was surprised to see her there, for neither she nor her husband used the ferry, as the metaled road to Santiago passed close to their house. But naturally I didn’t wait for explanations at that distance. I ran down, got into the boat and began to pull hand over hand on the guide-rope. The señora welcomed me with a smile.
“‘You may well stare,’ she said, as I gave her my hand to help her down the bank, ‘to find me in such a situation. I was driving from the town when our stupid mules took fright at a wild pig that ran between their feet. They swerved, bolted into the bush, smashed a wheel and there I found myself, less than three miles from home by the ford, and six by the road! You may imagine which I chose.’
“‘I’m truly sorry for your misfortune,’ said I, ‘but truly glad of the opportunity of doing you a service,’ for Spanish ladies expect this sort of thing and I began to collect my ideas for a further succession of compliments. I never had a chance to frame them, for the pirogue, which was in midstream again by now, quivered with a tremendous shock. It was lifted half out of the water!
“The next instant it began to rock from side to side, broke from the loop which held it to the guide-rope, and finally upset. The señora screamed, and both she and I instinctively grasped the strands above our heads. The boat floated on its side from beneath our feet!