Jock Of The Bushveld by Sir Percy Fitzpatrick (Chapter 22)( Page 3 ) The Old Crocodile

During the evening something reminded me of the horse, and I asked a question; and the end of Furley's answer was, "They say it's all a yarn about `horsewhipping' a crocodile: all we know is that one night, a week ago, he turned up here dripping wet, and after having a drink told us the yarn.  He had the leaded hunting-crop in his hand; and that's the horse he was riding.  You can make what you like of it.  We've been doctoring the horse ever since, but I doubt if it will pull through!" I have no doubt about the incident.  Owen did not invent: he had no need to; and Furley himself was no mean judge of crocodiles and men.  Furley kept a ferry boat for the use of natives and others when the river was up, at half a crown a trip.  The business ran itself and went strong during the summer floods, but in winter when the river was low and fordable it needed pushing; and then Furley's boatman, an intelligent native, would loiter about the drift and interest travellers in his crocodile stories, and if they proved over-confident or sceptical, would manoeuvre them a little way down stream where, from the bank, they would usually see a big crocodile sunning himself on a sand spit below the drift.  The boys always took the boat.  One day some police entered the store and joyously announced that they had got him--"bagged the old villain at last!"; and Furley dropped on a sack of mealies groaning out "Glory, Boys!  The ferry's ruined.  Why, I've preserved him for years!" The other crocodile incident concerns "Lying Tom"--brave merry-faced blue-eyed Tom; bubbling with good humour; overflowing with kindness; and full of the wildest yarns, always good and amusing, but so steep that they made the most case-hardened draw a long breath. The name Lying Tom was understood and accepted by every one in the place, barring Tom himself; for, oddly enough, there was another Tom of the same surname, but no relation, and once when his name cropped up I heard the real Simon Pure refer to him as "my namesake--the chap they call Lying Tom."  To the day of his death Tom believed that it was the other Tom who was esteemed the liar. Tom was a prospector who `came in' occasionally for supplies or licences; and there came a day when Barberton was convulsed by Lying Tom's latest. He had been walking along the bank of the Crocodile River, and on hearing screams ran down just in time to see a kaffir woman with a child on her back dragged off through the shallow water by a crocodile.  Tom ran in to help--"I kicked the dashed thing on the head and in the eyes," he said, "and punched its ribs and then grabbed the bucket that the woman had in her hand and hammered the blamed thing over the head till it let go.  By Jimminy, Boys, the woman was in a mess: never saw any one in such a fright!" Poor Tom suffered from consumption in the throat and talked in husky jerks broken by coughs and laughter.  Is there one among them who knew him who does not remember the breezy cheeriness, the indomitable pluck, the merry blue eyes, so limpidly clear, the expressive bushy eyebrows, and the teeth, too perfect to be wasted on a man, and ever flashing with his unfailing smiles? Tom would end up with--"Niggers said I was `takati': asked for some of my medicine!  Blamed got no pluck: would've let the woman go." Of course this story went the rounds latest and best; but one day we turned up in Barberton to deliver our loads, and that evening a whisper went about and men with faces humorously puzzled looked at one another and said "Lying Tom's a fraud: the crocodile story is true!" For our party, shooting guinea-fowl in the kaffir lands along the river, came upon a kraal where there sat a woman with an arm so scarred and marked that we could not but ask what had caused it.  There was no difference in the stories, except that the kaffirs after saying that the white man had kicked the crocodile and beaten it with the bucket, added "and he kicked and beat with the bucket the two men who were there, saying that they were not men but dogs, who would not go in and help the woman.  But he was bewitched: the crocodile could not touch him!"