“Naturally, I turned my steps toward the bayou, and it was there that I made the acquaintance of Pedro Garsia, Concepcion, his son, and the other member of the family, as I must call him, for from every point of view, he was treated like a relation. I allude to my friend Joaquin el Legardo—Jimmy the Alligator, in the vernacular—and he, I repeat, was every inch of thirty-six feet long. I dare say he was a hundred and fifty years old, and he led a more or less blameless existence in the swamp and stream adjacent to the Garsia bungalow.
“At first, though, it looked as if our relations might be strained. I’d got down to the bank, fitted up my rod and cast a speculative lump of frog’s flesh into the water just to see if anything sizeable was on the move. No sooner had I made the cast than there was a boil and a rush ’way out in midstream, and an ugly dun snout bobbed above the surface and took down my bait and half my line before I realized what was happening. It didn’t take me long to understand. I saw the great jaws open and champ viciously on the good catgut that was tangled in the yellow teeth, and I said a wicked word. Also I drew my revolver. Before I’d got it cocked I heard a terrible uproar from behind.
“An old man, with silver-white hair hanging over a chocolate-brown face, was running toward me, shouting as if he’d break a blood vessel.
“‘No shoot!’ he bawled, ‘no shoot!’ and he waved his arms with some of the most complete gesticulations I have ever witnessed. I put down my pistol and waited till he arrived panting.
“He was too much out of breath to say much at first, but what he did manage to whisper was to the point. ‘Bueno legardo—bueno,’ he repeated, pointing to the brute that was playing cat’s-cradle with my fishing line, and then, tapping the butt of my revolver, ‘no shoot—no!’
“I can tell you I was mystified, for the idea of a good alligator, as he kept calling it, was outside the pale of my experiences. I told him so. But he nodded and beckoned and led me down the bank a couple of hundred yards till we were opposite his house. There I found a rope stretched between two stumps across the river, with a loop running on it, and this last was lashed to the bow of a pirogue.
“‘This mine,’ he explained, smiling. ‘This what you call a ferry.’ I looked at the boat. Then I remembered that coming up from Santiago the road had circled widely. Blique Mountain had been in sight a good hour before we reached it and my driver had made me understand that we were avoiding the river. This was evidently the short cut for foot travelers.
“‘If this is the ferry, why in the name of gracious don’t you let me fill that old pirate with lead?’ I asked, as the brute floated comfortably by. ‘Not that he’d mind,’ I added, as I realized the size of him, ‘but you should get a howitzer and pump a six-pound ball through him. Some day, when your catboat’s full of people, he’ll upset it and fill his larder for a fortnight.’
“The old man smiled agreeably and put his head on one side like a magpie. He cocked me a comical look out of the corner of his eye.
‘This river not deep,’ he explained glibly. ‘This what you call ford one time,’ and he pointed toward the eddies that swirled between us and the opposite bank. I could see that they were running over shallows nowhere more than four feet deep. And at that the old chap toddled into the house and reappeared with a basket load of decaying lizard flesh. He came close to me and gave me a little nudge.