"She's flapping her wings in the crocodile heaven," said Bones, flippantly; "for I'm one of those dead shots--once I draw a bead on an animal----" "Get out a canoe and set the woodmen to dive for the Green One," said Hamilton to his orderly, for a shot crocodile invariably sinks to the bottom and can only be recovered by diving. They brought it to the surface, and Hamilton groaned. "It is M'zooba," he said in resigned exasperation. "Oh, Bones, what an ass you are!" Bones said nothing, but walked to the stern of the ship and lowered the blue ensign to half-mast--a piece of impertinence which Hamilton did not discover till a long time afterwards. Now whatever might be the desire or wish of Hamilton, and however much he might on ordinary occasions depend upon the loyalty of his warders and his men, in this matter of the green crocodile he was entirely at their mercy, for he could not call them together asking them to speak no death of the Green One without magnifying the importance of Lieutenant Tibbetts' rash act. The only attitude he could adopt was to treat the Green One and her untimely end as something which was in the day's work neither to be lamented nor acclaimed, and when, at the first village, a doleful deputation, comprising a worried chief and a sulky witch doctor, called upon him to bemoan the tragedy, he treated the matter with great joviality. "For what is a crocodile more or less in this river?" he asked. "Lord, this was no crocodile," said the witch doctor, "but a very reverend ghost, and it has been our Ju-ju for many years, bringing us good crops and fair weather for our goodness, and has eaten up all the devils and sickness which came to our villages. Now it is gone nothing but ill fortune can come to us." "Bugobo," said Hamilton, "you talk like a foolish one, for how may a crocodile who does not leave the water, and moreover is evil and old, a stealer of women and children and dangerous to your goats, how can this thing bring good fortune to any people?" "How can the river run, lord?" replied the man, "and yet it does." Hamilton thought for a moment. "Now I tell you this, and you shall say to all people who ask you, that by my magic I will bring another green one to this stream, greater and larger than the one who has gone, and she shall be ju-ju for all men." "And now," he said to Bones, when the deputation had left, "it is up to you to go out and find a nice, respectable crocodile to take the place of the lady you have so light-heartedly destroyed." Bones gasped. "Dear old feller," he said feebly, "the habits and customs of fauna of this land are entirely beyond me. I will fetch you a crocodile, sir, with the greatest of pleasure, although as far as I know there is nothing laid down in the King's regulations of the warrants for pay and promotion defining the catching of crocodiles as part of an officer's duty."