“That same evening Joaquin’s carcass floated up upon a sandbank a hundred yards below the bungalow. The next morning it was gone. The bush behind the bank was trampled and bloodstained, and the niggers began to whisper. They told me, in confidence, that the Spaniard had dug his heart out to make a fetich of and that I was doomed to many lingering torments. Naturally, I took small notice of that sort of thing.
“The hands, now that the ferry had become a ford again, went much more frequently down to Santiago, and it was not long before I heard that Concepcion had been seen there. But his bungalow was closed, his nigger had been sent about his business, and the weeds began to fill his garden, as weeds do in tropical countries alone. At the end of a couple of weeks I began to believe that we had seen the last of Señor Concepcion.
“And then a thing happened that appeared to be no less than a miracle. One evening, less than half an hour after a score of the hands had set out to spend the next day’s fiesta in the town, nineteen of them were back in my veranda, yelling, screeching that Joaquin was returned—back and playing his old tricks again! He had risen in the midst of them as they forded the stream and had taken down Tome, a quadroon pickman, exactly as he had taken down Red Rambo less than a month before.
“Of course, I didn’t believe them. I had seen my bullets go home into Joaquin’s brain and heart and I opined that Tome, for the joke of the thing, had dived with a bit of a splutter and was probably laughing himself into convulsions at the success of the trick. I put this view of the case to the others mildly.
“They didn’t seem to have breath enough to pour all the contempt they felt upon the idea. ‘Dived! Joking!’ He was pulled down, screaming, they declared—they saw the jaws close on him—there wasn’t one of them five yards from him when he was taken!
“I shrugged my shoulders, took my rifle and went back with them to the river bank. You can just figure my astonishment when a dun snout, as like the late Joaquin’s as one pea is like another, cut a lazy ripple across the surface as it went sliding out from the bank into midstream! And the boil of his tail showed up ten yards behind his head. I hadn’t believed that there was another such alligator in the wide world!
“These reflections didn’t prevent my rifle-butt coming up to my shoulder. I aimed for a point three inches behind the snout. We heard the bullet thud, but the brute didn’t twitch—he didn’t even close his half-open eye! He just let the water close slowly over his head—so slowly that I found time to empty my magazine at him as he sank. Every one of the five bullets hit his wicked head, and the last glanced off! We knew it by the sound of a second thud among the echoes of the report, while a splash of splintered wood showed on a branch on the opposite side of the stream. Positively and actually, this new Joaquin had a shot-proof skull!
“The niggers were gabbling excitedly about Ju-ju, and such like idolatries, while the dagos were little better. As for me, I sat down upon a stump and took my head in my hands. That two brutes of the same size should appear in the same unimportant little Cuban creek was almost unbelievable—to the superstitious imaginations of the mine hands it could be explained in one way alone. It was debbil-debbil, and they went off home up the hill, starting out of their skins if a bird rustled in the bushes. I was left sitting and wondering.
“At the sound of an opening door some time later I looked up. Concepcion Garsia came sauntering out of the bungalow. I reached for my Winchester.
“He strolled on toward me slowly and complacently, halted a few yards away and bowed. There was a wicked sneer round his thin lips.