visit, and already the mischief had been done.
Denton was one of those lean, hard-bitten men with smouldering eyes and
a brick-red complexion. He looked what he was, the man of action and
enterprise. He had the wiry frame and strong jaw without which no
explorer is complete, and Mortimer, beside him, seemed but a poor, soft
product of our hot-house civilization. Mortimer, I forgot to say, wore
glasses; and, if there is one time more than another when a man should
not wear glasses, it is while a strong-faced, keen-eyed wanderer in the
wilds is telling a beautiful girl the story of his adventures.
For this was what Denton was doing. My arrival seemed to have
interrupted him in the middle of narrative. He shook my hand in a
strong, silent sort of way, and resumed:
'Well, the natives seemed fairly friendly, so I decided to stay the
night.'
I made a mental note never to seem fairly friendly to an explorer. If
you do, he always decides to stay the night.
'In the morning they took me down to the river. At this point it widens
into a kongo, or pool, and it was here, they told me, that the
crocodile mostly lived, subsisting on the native oxen--the short-horned
jongos--which, swept away by the current while crossing the ford
above, were carried down on the longos, or rapids. It was not,
however, till the second evening that I managed to catch sight of his
ugly snout above the surface. I waited around, and on the third day I
saw him suddenly come out of the water and heave his whole length on to
a sandbank in mid-stream and go to sleep in the sun. He was certainly a
monster--fully thirty--you have never been in Central Africa, have you,
Miss Weston? No? You ought to go there!--fully fifty feet from tip to
tail. There he lay, glistening. I shall never forget the sight.'
He broke off to light a cigarette. I heard Betty draw in her breath
sharply. Mortimer was beaming through his glasses with the air of the
owner of a dog which is astonishing a drawing-room with its clever
tricks.
'And what did you do then, Mr. Denton?' asked Betty, breathlessly.
'Yes, what did you do then, old chap?' said Mortimer.
Denton blew out the match and dropped it on the ash-tray.
'Eh? Oh,' he said, carelessly, 'I swam across and shot him.'
'Swam across and shot him!'
'Yes. It seemed to me that the chance was too good to be missed. Of
course, I might have had a pot at him from the bank, but the chances
were I wouldn't have hit him in a vital place. So I swam across to the
sandbank, put the muzzle of my gun in his mouth, and pulled the
trigger. I have rarely seen a crocodile so taken aback.'
'But how dreadfully dangerous!'
'Oh, danger!' Eddie Denton laughed lightly. 'One drops into the habit
of taking a few risks out there, you know. Talking of danger,
the time when things really did look a little nasty was when the
wounded gongo cornered me in a narrow tongo and I only had
a pocket-knife with everything in it broken except the corkscrew
and the thing for taking stones out of horses' hoofs. It was like
