Cochran answered quickly to head off the more explicit Casey: "Oh, he's busy--busy with Sears." Terry understood. Cochran sparred for an opening in the silence his friendship for Sears made embarrassing. "Lieutenant, you are likely to have work for your soldiers pretty soon. There's a rough outfit gathering down here in the Gulf--though I imagine Bronner told you all about it." "He told me something of it, but I would like to hear more." "Well, I don't know much about it, excepting that a score or more of tough characters have come down in the past two months. They settled on a mangy plantation up the coast, north of Davao, but they aren't working: just loafing around all day. They seem to be waiting for something--or somebody. The natives are scared, and the whites don't feel any too good about it either! You know we are scattered all over the Gulf--everybody a mile or more away from his neighbors--and that means a mile of jungle." Casey flared up: "We ought to run 'em out--they're no good, probably carabao thieves or worse--" "How worse?" grinned Cochran. "Horse thieves--or pig thieves?" Casey did not mind being ragged by his friends. He persisted: "Lieutenant, you ought to run 'em out as undesirables or under the vagabond law! They're no good--they won't work--and they're the toughest lookin' lot I ever did see! Sure and if I had my way I'd toss the lot into Sears' crocodile hole--the dirty, low-lived, shiftless lot of 'em!" Terry was interested: "Sears' crocodile hole?" he asked. Cochran laughingly explained: "It's more or less of a joke between Sears and Lindsey: each has a hoodoo on his place that makes it harder to get laborers. The Bogobos fear a great snake they swear haunts Lindsey's woods, and none of them wants to go near a pool on Sears' places just below the ford--they claim it is the home of a monstrous crocodile, thirty feet long. No white man has ever seen either; it's a big joke in a way--but a costly one for them as it makes the wild men give their places a wide berth." "What have they done about it?" "Everything. Got up hunting parties--stalked the places for hours and days, tried to convince the natives that it is all bosh. But they insist it's all true, and stay away--and loss of man power means loss of money they both need this year. Both of them think the stories are just the usual Bogobo exaggerations." Terry thought Cochran not quite convinced: "What do you think?" "I? Oh, I don't know. It's hard to swallow the stories--man-eating snakes and crocodiles sound all right on the lips of the old Spaniards but where our flag flies things seem to sober down. Yet I've usually found that back of all these Bogobo tales there is an element of truth: and two years ago when I was clearing my place I shot an eighteen-foot python. Stumbled on it sleeping--glad it was!"