THE ALLIGATOR WAR
It was a very big river in a region of South America that had never beenvisited by white men; and in it lived many, many alligators--perhaps ahundred, perhaps a thousand. For dinner they ate fish, which they caughtin the stream, and for supper they ate deer and other animals that camedown to the water side to drink. On hot afternoons in summer theystretched out and sunned themselves on the bank. But they liked nightswhen the moon was shining best of all. Then they swam out into the riverand sported and played, lashing the water to foam with their tails,while the spray ran off their beautiful skins in all the colors of therainbow.
These alligators had lived quite happy lives for a long, long time. Butat last one afternoon, when they were all sleeping on the sand, snoringand snoring, one alligator woke up and cocked his ears--the wayalligators cock their ears. He listened and listened, and, to be sure,faintly, and from a great distance, came a sound: _Chug!_ _Chug!__Chug!_
"Hey!" the alligator called to the alligator sleeping next to him, "Hey!Wake up! Danger!"
"Danger of what?" asked the other, opening his eyes sleepily, andgetting up.
"I don't know!" replied the first alligator.
"That's a noise I never heard before. Listen!"
The other alligator listened: _Chug!_ _Chug!_ _Chug!_
In great alarm the two alligators went calling up and down the riverbank: "Danger! Danger!" And all their sisters and brothers and mothersand fathers and uncles and aunts woke up and began running this way andthat with their tails curled up in the air. But the excitement did notserve to calm their fears. _Chug!_ _Chug!_ _Chug!_ The noise was growinglouder every moment; and at last, away off down the stream, they couldsee something moving along the surface of the river, leaving a trail ofgray smoke behind it and beating the water on either side to foam:_Chush!_ _Chush!_ _Chush!_
The alligators looked at each other in the greatest astonishment: "Whaton earth is that?"
But there was one old alligator, the wisest and most experienced of themall. He was so old that only two sound teeth were left in his jaws--onein the upper jaw and one in the lower jaw. Once, also, when he was aboy, fond of adventure, he had made a trip down the river all the way tothe sea.
"I know what it is," said he. "It's a whale. Whales are big fish, theyshoot water up through their noses, and it falls down on them behind."
At this news, the little alligators began to scream at the top of theirlungs, "It's a whale! It's a whale! It's a whale!" and they made for thewater intending to duck out of sight.
But the big alligator cuffed with his tail a little alligator that wasscreaming nearby with his mouth open wide. "Dry up!" said he. "There'snothing to be afraid of! I know all about whales! Whales are theafraidest people there are!" And the little alligators stopped theirnoise.
But they grew frightened again a moment afterwards. The gray smokesuddenly turned to an inky black, and the _Chush!_ _Chush!_ _Chush!_ wasnow so loud that all the alligators took to the water, with only theireyes and the tips of their noses showing at the surface.
_Cho-ash-h-h!_ _Cho-ash-h-h!_ _Cho-ash-h-h!_ The strange monster camerapidly up the stream. The alligators saw it go crashing past them,belching great clouds of smoke from the middle of its back, andsplashing into the water heavily with the big revolving things it had oneither side.
It was a steamer, the first steamer that had ever made its way up theParana. _Chush!_ _Chush!_ _Chush!_ It seemed to be getting further awayagain. _Chug!_ _Chug!_ _Chug!_ It had disappeared from view.
One by one, the alligators climbed up out of the water onto the bankagain. They were all quite cross with the old alligator who had toldthem wrongly that it was a whale.
"It was not a whale!" they shouted in his ear--for he was rather hard ofhearing. "Well, what was it that just went by?"
The old alligator then explained that it was a steamboat full of fire;and that the alligators would all die if the boat continued to go up anddown the river.
The other alligators only laughed, however. Why would the alligators dieif the boat kept going up and down the river? It had passed by withoutso much as speaking to them! That old alligator didn't really know somuch as he pretended to! And since they were very hungry they all wentfishing in the stream. But alas! There was not a fish to be found! Thesteamboat had frightened every single one of them away.
"Well, what did I tell you?" said the old alligator. "You see: wehaven't anything left to eat! All the fish have been frightened away!However--let's just wait till tomorrow. Perhaps the boat won't come backagain. In that case, the fish will get over their fright and come backso that we can eat them." But the next day, the steamboat came crashingby again on its way back down the river, spouting black smoke as it haddone before, and setting the whole river boiling with its paddle wheels.
"Well!" exclaimed the alligators. "What do you think of that? The boatcame yesterday. The boat came today. The boat will come tomorrow. Thefish will stay away; and nothing will come down here at night to drink.We are done for!"
But an idea occurred to one of the brighter alligators: "Let's dam theriver!" he proposed. "The steamboat won't be able to climb a dam!"
"That's the talk! That's the talk! A dam! A dam! Let's build a dam!" Andthe alligators all made for the shore as fast as they could.
They went up into the woods along the bank and began to cut down treesof the hardest wood they could find--walnut and mahogany, mostly. Theyfelled more than ten thousand of them altogether, sawing the trunksthrough with the kind of saw that alligators have on the tops of theirtails. They dragged the trees down into the water and stood them upabout a yard apart, all the way across the river, driving the pointedends deep into the mud and weaving the branches together. No steamboat,big or little, would ever be able to pass that dam! No one wouldfrighten the fish away again! They would have a good dinner thefollowing day and every day! And since it was late at night by the timethe dam was done, they all fell sound asleep on the river bank.
_Chug!_ _Chug!_ _Chug!_ _Chush!_ _Chush!_ _Chush!_ _Cho-ash-h-h-h!__Cho-ash-h-h-h!_ _Cho-ash-h-h-h!_
They were still asleep, the next day, when the boat came up; but thealligators barely opened their eyes and then tried to go to sleep again.What did they care about the boat? It could make all the noise itwanted, but it would never get by the dam!
And that is what happened. Soon the noise from the boat stopped. The menwho were steering on the bridge took out their spy-glasses and began tostudy the strange obstruction that had been thrown up across the river.Finally a small boat was sent to look into it more closely. Only thendid the alligators get up from where they were sleeping, run down intothe water, and swim out behind the dam, where they lay floating andlooking downstream between the piles. They could not help laughing,nevertheless, at the joke they had played on the steamboat!
The small boat came up, and the men in it saw how the alligators hadmade a dam across the river. They went back to the steamer, but soonafter, came rowing up toward the dam again.
"Hey, you, alligators!"
"What can we do for you?" answered the alligators, sticking their headsthrough between the piles in the dam.
"That dam is in our way!" said the men.
"Tell us something we don't know!" answered the alligators.
"But we can't get by!"
"I'll say so!"
"Well, take the old thing out of the way!"
"Nosireesir!"
The men in the boat talked it over for a while and then they called:
"Alligators!"
"What can we do for you?"
"Will you take the dam away?"
"No!"
"No?"
"No!"
"Very well! See you later!"
"The later the better," said the alligators.
The rowboat went back to the steamer, while the alligators, as happy ascould be, clapped their tails as loud as they could on the water. Noboat could ever get by that dam, and drive the fish away again
!
But the next day the steamboat returned; and when the alligators lookedat it, they could not say a word from their surprise: it was not thesame boat at all, but a larger one, painted gray like a mouse! How manysteamboats were there, anyway? And this one probably would want to passthe dam! Well, just let it try! No, sir! No steamboat, little or big,would ever get through that dam!
"They shall not pass!" said the alligators, each taking up his stationbehind the piles in the dam.
The new boat, like the other one, stopped some distance below the dam;and again a little boat came rowing toward them. This time there wereeight sailors in it, with one officer. The officer shouted:
"Hey, you, alligators!"
"What's the matter?" answered the alligators.
"Going to get that dam out of there?"
"No!"
"No?"
"No!"
"Very well!" said the officer. "In that case, we shall have to shoot itdown!"
"Shoot it up if you want to!" said the alligators.
And the boat returned to the steamer.
But now, this mouse-gray steamboat was not an ordinary steamboat: it wasa warship, with armor plate and terribly powerful guns. The oldalligator who had made the trip to the river mouth suddenly remembered,and just in time to shout to the other alligators: "Duck for your lives!Duck! She's going to shoot! Keep down deep under water."
The alligators dived all at the same time, and headed for the shore,where they halted, keeping all their bodies out of sight except fortheir noses and their eyes. A great cloud of flame and smoke burst fromthe vessel's side, followed by a deafening report. An immense solid shothurtled through the air and struck the dam exactly in the middle. Two orthree tree trunks were cut away into splinters and drifted offdownstream. Another shot, a third, and finally a fourth, each tearing agreat hole in the dam. Finally the piles were entirely destroyed; not atree, not a splinter, not a piece of bark, was left; and the alligators,still sitting with their eyes and noses just out of water, saw thewarship come steaming by and blowing its whistle in derision at them.
Then the alligators came out on the bank and held a council of war. "Ourdam was not strong enough," said they; "we must make a new and muchthicker one."
So they worked again all that afternoon and night, cutting down the verybiggest trees they could find, and making a much better dam than theyhad built before. When the gunboat appeared the next day, they weresleeping soundly and had to hurry to get behind the piles of the dam bythe time the rowboat arrived there.
"Hey, alligators!" called the same officer.
"See who's here again!" said the alligators, jeeringly.
"Get that new dam out of there!"
"Never in the world!"
"Well, we'll blow it up, the way we did the other!"
"Blaze away, and good luck to you!"
You see, the alligators talked so big because they were sure the damthey had made this time would hold up against the most terrible cannonballs in the world. And the sailors must have thought so, too; for afterthey had fired the first shot a tremendous explosion occurred in thedam. The gunboat was using shells, which burst among the timbers of thedam and broke the thickest trees into tiny, tiny bits. A second shellexploded right near the first, and a third near the second. So the shotswent all along the dam, each tearing away a long strip of it tillnothing, nothing, nothing was left. Again the warship came steaming by,closer in toward shore on this occasion, so that the sailors could makefun of the alligators by putting their hands to their mouths andholloing.
"So that's it!" said the alligators, climbing up out of the water. "Wemust all die, because the steamboats will keep coming and going, up anddown, and leaving us not a fish in the world to eat!"
The littlest alligators were already whimpering; for they had had nodinner for three days; and it was a crowd of very sad alligators thatgathered on the river shore to hear what the old alligator now had tosay.
"We have only one hope left," he began. "We must go and see theSturgeon! When I was a boy, I took that trip down to the sea along withhim. He liked the salt water better than I did, and went quite a way outinto the ocean. There he saw a sea fight between two of these boats; andhe brought home a torpedo that had failed to explode. Suppose we go andask him to give it to us. It is true the Sturgeon has never liked usalligators; but I got along with him pretty well myself. He is a goodfellow, at bottom, and surely he will not want to see us all starve!"
The fact was that some years before an alligator had eaten one of theSturgeon's favorite grandchildren; and for that reason the Sturgeon hadrefused ever since to call on the alligators or receive visits fromthem. Nevertheless, the alligators now trouped off in a body to the bigcave under the bank of the river where they knew the Sturgeon stayed,with his torpedo beside him. There are sturgeons as much as six feetlong, you know, and this one with the torpedo was of that kind.
"Mr. Sturgeon! Mr. Sturgeon!" called the alligators at the entrance ofthe cave. No one of them dared go in, you see, on account of that matterof the sturgeon's grandchild.
"Who is it?" answered the Sturgeon.
"We're the alligators," the latter replied in a chorus.
"I have nothing to do with alligators," grumbled the Sturgeon crossly.
But now the old alligator with the two teeth stepped forward and said:
"Why, hello, Sturgy. Don't you remember Ally, your old friend that tookthat trip down the river, when we were boys?"
"Well, well! Where have you been keeping yourself all these years," saidthe Sturgeon, surprised and pleased to hear his old friend's voice."Sorry I didn't know it was you! How goes it? What can I do for you?"
"We've come to ask you for that torpedo you found, remember? You see,there's a warship keeps coming up and down our river scaring all thefish away. She's a whopper, I'll tell you, armor plate, guns, the wholething! We made one dam and she knocked it down. We made another and sheblew it up. The fish have all gone away and we haven't had a bite to eatin near onto a week. Now you give us your torpedo and we'll do therest!"
The Sturgeon sat thinking for a long time, scratching his chin with oneof his fins. At last he answered:
"As for the torpedo, all right! You can have it in spite of what you didto my eldest son's first-born. But there's one trouble: who knows how towork the thing?"
The alligators were all silent. Not one of them had ever seen a torpedo.
"Well," said the Sturgeon, proudly, "I can see I'll have to go with youmyself. I've lived next to that torpedo a long time. I know all abouttorpedoes."
The first task was to bring the torpedo down to the dam. The alligatorsgot into line, the one behind taking in his mouth the tail of the one infront. When the line was formed it was fully a quarter of a mile long.The Sturgeon pushed the torpedo out into the current, and got under itso as to hold it up near the top of the water on his back. Then he tookthe tail of the last alligator in his teeth, and gave the signal to goahead. The Sturgeon kept the torpedo afloat, while the alligators towedhim along. In this way they went so fast that a wide wake followed onafter the torpedo; and by the next morning they were back at the placewhere the dam was made.
As the little alligators who had stayed at home reported, the warshiphad already gone by upstream. But this pleased the others all the more.Now they would build a new dam, stronger than ever before, and catch thesteamer in a trap, so that it would never get home again.
They worked all that day and all the next night, making a thick, almostsolid dike, with barely enough room between the piles for the alligatorsto stick their heads through. They had just finished when the gunboatcame into view.
Again the rowboat approached with the eight men and their officer. Thealligators crowded behind the dam in great excitement, moving their pawsto hold their own with the current; for this time, they were downstream.
"Hey, alligators!" called the officer.
"Well?" answered the alligators.
"Still another dam?"
"If at first you don't succeed, try, try, again!"
"Get that dam out of there!"
"No, sir!"
"You won't?"
"We won't!"
"Very well! Now you alligators just listen! If you won't be reasonable,we are going to knock this dam down, too. But to save you the trouble ofbuilding a fourth, we are going to shoot every blessed alligator aroundhere. Yes, every single last alligator, women and children, big ones,little ones, fat ones, lean ones, and even that old codger sitting therewith only two teeth left in his jaws!"
The old alligator understood that the officer was trying to insult himwith that reference to his two teeth, and he answered:
"Young man, what you say is true. I have only two teeth left, notcounting one or two others that are broken off. But do you know whatthose two teeth are going to eat for dinner?" As he said this the oldalligator opened his mouth wide, wide, wide.
"Well, what are they going to eat?" asked one of the sailors.
"A little dude of a naval officer I see in a boat over there!"--and theold alligator dived under water and disappeared from view.
Meantime the Sturgeon had brought the torpedo to the very center of thedam, where four alligators were holding it fast to the river bottomwaiting for orders to bring it up to the top of the water. The otheralligators had gathered along the shore, with their noses and eyes alonein sight as usual.
The rowboat went back to the ship. When he saw the men climbing aboard,the Sturgeon went down to his torpedo.
Suddenly there was a loud detonation. The warship had begun firing, andthe first shell struck and exploded in the middle of the dam. A greatgap opened in it.
"Now! Now!" called the Sturgeon sharply, on seeing that there was roomfor the torpedo to go through. "Let her go! Let her go!"
As the torpedo came to the surface, the Sturgeon steered it to theopening in the dam, took aim hurriedly with one eye closed, and pulledat the trigger of the torpedo with his teeth. The propeller of thetorpedo began to revolve, and it started off upstream toward thegunboat.
And it was high time. At that instant a second shot exploded in the dam,tearing away another large section.
From the wake the torpedo left behind it in the water the men on thevessel saw the danger they were in, but it was too late to do anythingabout it. The torpedo struck the ship in the middle, and went off.
You can never guess the terrible noise that torpedo made. It blew thewarship into fifteen thousand million pieces, tossing guns, andsmokestacks, and shells and rowboats--everything, hundreds and hundredsof yards away.
The alligators all screamed with triumph and made as fast as they couldfor the dam. Down through the opening bits of wood came floating, with anumber of sailors swimming as hard as they could for the shore. As themen passed through, the alligators put their paws to their mouths andholloed, as the men had done to them three days before. They decided notto eat a single one of the sailors, though some of them deserved itwithout a doubt. Except that when a man dressed in a blue uniform withgold braid came by, the old alligator jumped into the water off the dam,and snap! snap! ate him in two mouthfuls.
"Who was that man?" asked an ignorant young alligator, who never learnedhis lessons in school and never knew what was going on.
"It's the officer of the boat," answered the Sturgeon. "My old friend,Ally, said he was going to eat him, and eaten him he has!"
The alligators tore down the rest of the dam, because they knew that noboats would be coming by that way again.
The Sturgeon, who had quite fallen in love with the gold lace of theofficer, asked that it be given him in payment for the use of historpedo. The alligators said he might have it for the trouble of pickingit out of the old alligator's mouth, where it had caught on the twoteeth. They gave him also the officer's belt and sword. The Sturgeon putthe belt on just behind his front fins, and buckled the sword to it.Thus togged out, he swam up and down for more than an hour in front ofthe assembled alligators, who admired his beautiful spotted skin assomething almost as pretty as the coral snake's, and who opened theirmouths wide at the splendor of his uniform. Finally they escorted him inhonor back to his cave under the river bank, thanking him over and overagain, and giving him three cheers as they went off.
When they returned to their usual place they found the fish had alreadyreturned. The next day another steamboat came by; but the alligators didnot care, because the fish were getting used to it by this time andseemed not to be afraid. Since then the boats have been going back andforth all the time, carrying oranges. And the alligators open their eyeswhen they hear the _chug! chug! chug!_ of a steamboat and laugh at thethought of how scared they were the first time, and of how they sank thewarship.
But no warship has ever gone up the river since the old alligator atethe officer.