t 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."

Hamilton made no further move towards replacing the lost Spirit of the
Pool until he learnt that his offer had been taken very seriously, and
that the coming of the great new Green One to the pool, was a subject of
discussion up and down the river.

Now here is a fact which official reco