hole countryside stood about watching the still water, but nothing
happened.

"Can't you whistle him and make him come up or something?" asked
Hamilton.

"Sir," said an indignant Bones, "I am no crocodile tamer; willing as I
am to oblige you, and clever as I am with parlour tricks, I have not
yet succeeded in inducing a crocodile to come to heel after a week's
acquaintance."

But native people are very patient.

They stood or squatted, watching the unmoved surface of the water for
half an hour, and then suddenly there was a stir and a little gasp of
pleasurable apprehension ran through the assembly.

Then slowly the new one came up. He made for a sand-bank, which showed
above the water in the centre of the pool; first his snout, then his
long body emerged from the water, and Hamilton gasped.

"Good heavens, Bones!" he said in a startled whisper, and his
astonishment was echoed from a thousand throats.

And well might he be amazed at the spectacle which the complacent Bones
had secured for him.

For this great reptile was more than green, he was a green so vivid that
it put the colours of the forest to shame. A bright, glittering green
and along the centre of his broad back one zig-zag splash of orange.

"Phew," whistled Hamilton, "this is something like."

The roar of approval from the people was unmistakable. The crocodile
turned his evil head and for a moment, as it seemed to Bones, his eyes
glinted viciously in the direction of the young and enterprising
officer. And Bones admitted after to a feeling of panic.

Then with a malignant "woof!" like the hoarse, growling bark of a dog,
magnified a hundred times, he slid back into the water, a great living
streak of vivid green and disappeared to the cool retreat at the bottom
of the pool.

"You have done splendidly, Bones, splendidly!" said Hamilton, and
clapped him on the back; "really you are a most enterprising devil."

"Not at all, sir," said Bones.

He ate his dinner on the _Zaire_, answering with monosyllables the
questions which Hamilton put to him regarding the quest and the place of
the origin of this wonderful beast. It was after dinner when they were
smoking their cigars in the gloom as the _Zaire_ was steaming across its
way to the shore where a wooding offered an excuse for a night's stay,
and Bones gave voice to his thoughts.

And curiously enough his conversation did not deal directly or
indirectly with his discovery.

"When was this bo