where his river joined another river to form one of the main water highways of the Low Country, the mad gator met the flood tide. For some distance he bucked the current; but as its sweep grew stronger, little by little he turned and, swinging far over toward the eastern bank, headed back upstream.
His frenzy was passing now, or else his strength was giving out. He drifted rather than swam, and the current kept him near the eastern shore. Hence, when he reached the place where the river divided, it was the eastern branch that he ascended and not the western, down which he had come and which would take him back to his home. On and on he drifted for hours—weak, dazed, suffering, but no longer insane, dully conscious of his surroundings. At last, passing close to the mouth of a marsh gully, he propelled himself with feeble movements of his tail into this small waterway and came to rest on a mud bank just within the entrance.
In this strange manner the king of the river came to a new country. It was in early April that he came; and about the middle of the following September, Sandy Jim Mayfield, the hawk-faced, white-haired woodsman who lived at the edge of a big swamp near the eastern river, set himself two tasks—two tasks that were much to his taste. He would
