I don’t know but what I’d rather be behind an alligator than in front of one, come to think of it. I’ve seen one outrun a horse through the palmettos and across a flat-woods. Like Uncle Breck. He’d of give a pretty to of been behind the alligator the time it run him. That was over in Gulf Hammock, not far from the Gulf of Mexico. Me and Uncle Breck was to a pond, shooting ducks. The ducks’d circle overhead and we’d shoot ’em so’s they’d fall in the woods behind us, and us not have to wade in the pond amongst the alligators. I’ll swear, I never seen so many alligators. I reckon there was three hundred heads in sight, all sticking up out of the water. ’Gators just ain’t plentiful in Florida now, the way they was then in Gulf Hammock.

I was watching for ducks—shooting and watching. Directly I hears Uncle Breck say, “Oo-o-ee-e!” Then he says, kind of faintified, “Shoot him, Fred—shoot him!” I looks around. Now, what he’d done to him first—if he shot him or what—I don’t know, but it was Uncle Breck and the alligator across the woods.

Chasing him? The alligator was really chasing Uncle Breck.

I reckon there’s been men has travelled faster than Uncle Breck. I don’t reckon there’s ever been a man has tried to travel faster. I mean, he was selling out. The ’gator was this high off the ground. . . . They made a turn around a bay tree. They was coming mighty near straight to me.

Uncle Breck calls in a weak voice, “Shoot him, Fred—shoot him!”

The devil of it was, I couldn’t shoot the alligator for shooting Uncle Breck.

Directly they hits a log two-three feet high. Uncle Breck jumps it—he hurdled fast and pretty—and the alligator has to take a minute to waddle over it. It didn’t stop him—a ’gator’ll go right over a five-foot fence—but he couldn’t take it as fast as Uncle Breck. The ’gator slowing down for the log give me the first chance, what with laughing and not craving to shoot Uncle Breck, to get a shot at him. And then, bless Katy, Uncle Breck was fixing to tear me down for not shooting sooner!

You wouldn’t think it, but a ’gator’s the hardest thing there is to kill, to his size. That is, to kill so he’s dead good. Must be because his brain’s so small he ain’t got the sense to know when he belongs to be dead. One fooled me thataway just a while back when I was out with Endy Wilkers, and him ’gator hunting. We was in Indian Prairie, and it about dry. Endy was working the marsh edge and catching little old bitty ones, and he steps in a ’gator cave. The old mammy takened out after him. I shot one time and I figured I’d killed her dead.