The Project Gutenberg EBook of Long Odds, by H. Rider Haggard

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Title: Long Odds

Author: H. Rider Haggard

Release Date: March 31, 2006 [EBook #2730]
Last Updated: September 22, 2016

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

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Produced by John Bickers; Dagny; Emma Dudding





LONG ODDS

by H. Rider Haggard


This is the second PG version of Long Odds, also see Etext #1918.



The story which is narrated in the following pages came to me from the
lips of my old friend Allan Quatermain, or Hunter Quatermain, as we used
to call him in South Africa. He told it to me one evening when I was
stopping with him at the place he bought in Yorkshire. Shortly after
that, the death of his only son so unsettled him that he immediately
left England, accompanied by two companions, his old fellow-voyagers,
Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, and has now utterly vanished into the
dark heart of Africa. He is persuaded that a white people, of which he
has heard rumours all his life, exists somewhere on the highlands in the
vast, still unexplored interior, and his great ambition is to find them
before he dies. This is the wild quest upon which he and his companions
have departed, and from which I shrewdly suspect they never will return.
One letter only have I received from the old gentleman, dated from a
mission station high up the Tana, a river on the east coast, about three
hundred miles north of Zanzibar. In it he says they have gone through
many hardships and adventures, but are alive and well, and have found
traces which go far towards making him hope that the results of their
wild quest may be a “magnificent and unexampled discovery.” I greatly
fear, however, that all he has discovered is death; for this letter came
a long while ago, and nobody has heard a single word of the party since.
They have totally vanished.

It was on the last evening of my stay at his house that he told the
ensuing story to me and Captain Good, who was dining with him. He had
eaten his dinner and drunk two or three glasses of old port, just to
help Good and myself to the end of the second bottle. It was an unusual
thing for him to do, for he was a most abstemious man, having conceived,
as he used to say, a great horror of drink from observing its effects
upon the class of men--hunters, transport riders, and others--amongst
whom he had passed so many years of his life. Consequently the good wine
took more effect on him that it would have done on most men, sending a
little flush into his wrinkled cheeks, and making him talk more freely
than usual.

Dear old man! I can see him now, as he went limping up and down the
vestibule, with his grey hair sticking up in scrubbing-brush fashion,
his shrivelled yellow face, and his large dark eyes, that were as keen
as any hawk’s, and yet soft as a buck’s. The whole room was hung with
trophies of his numerous hunting expeditions, and he had some story
about every one of them, if only he could be got to tell them. Generally
he would not, for he was not very fond of narrating his own adventures,
but to-night the port wine made him more communicative.

“Ah, you brute!” he said, stopping beneath an unusually large skull of
a lion, which was fixed just over the mantelpiece, beneath a long row of
guns, its jaws distended to their utmost width. “Ah, you brute! you have
given me a lot of trouble for the last dozen years, and will, I suppose,
to my dying day.”

“Tell us the yarn, Quatermain,” said Good. “You have often promised to
tell me, and you never have.”

“You had better not ask me to,” he answered, “for it is a longish one.”

“All right,” I said, “the evening is young, and there is some more
port.”

Thus adjured, he filled his pipe from a jar of coarse-cut Boer tobacco
that was always standing on the mantelpiece, and still walking up and
down the room, began--

“It was, I think, in the March of ‘69 that I was up in Sikukuni’s
country. It was just after old Sequati’s time, and Sikukuni had got into
power--I forget how. Anyway, I was there. I had heard that the Bapedi
people had brought down an enormous quantity of ivory from the interior,
and so I started with a waggon-load of goods, and came straight away
from Middelburg to try and trade some of it. It was a risky thing to
go into the country so early, on account of the fever; but I knew that
there were one or two others after that lot of ivory, so I determined
to have a try for it, and take my chance of fever. I had become so tough
from continual knocking about that I did not set it down at much.

“Well, I got on all right for a while. It is a wonderfully beautiful
piece of bush veldt, with great ranges of mountains running through it,
and round granite koppies starting up here and there, looking out like
sentinels over the rolling waste of bush. But it is very hot--hot as a
stew-pan--and when I was there that March, which, of course, is autumn
in this part of Africa, the whole place reeked of fever. Every morning,
as I trekked along down by the Oliphant River, I used to creep from the
waggon at dawn and look out. But there was no river to be seen--only a
long line of billows of what looked like the finest cotton wool tossed
up lightly with a pitchfork. It was the fever mist. Out from among the
scrub, too, came little spirals of vapour, as though there were hundreds
of tiny fires alight in it--reek rising from thousands of tons of
rotting vegetation. It was a beautiful place, but the beauty was the
beauty of death; and all those lines and blots of vapour wrote one great
word across the surface of the country, and that word was ‘fever.’

“It was a dreadful year of illness that. I came, I remember, to one
little kraal of Knobnoses, and went up to it to see if I could get some
_maas_, or curdled butter-milk, and a few mealies. As I drew near I was
struck with the silence of the place. No children began to chatter, and
no dogs barked. Nor could I see any native sheep or cattle. The place,
though it had evidently been recently inhabited, was as still as the
bush round it, and some guinea fowl got up out of the prickly pear
bushes right at the kraal gate. I remember that I hesitated a little
before going in, there was such an air of desolation about the spot.
Nature never looks desolate when man has not yet laid his hand upon her
breast; she is only lonely. But when man has been, and has passed away,
then she looks desolate.

“Well, I passed into the kraal, and went up to the principal hut. In
front of the hut was something with an old sheep-skin _kaross_ thrown
over it. I stooped down and drew off the rug, and then shrank back
amazed, for under it was the body of a young woman recently dead. For a
moment I thought of turning back, but my curiosity overcame me; so going
past the dead woman I went down on my hands and knees and crept into the
hut. It was so dark that I could not see anything, though I could smell
a great deal, so I lit a match. It was a ‘tandstickor’ match, and burnt
slowly and dimly, and as the light gradually increased I made out what
I took to be a family of people, men, women, and children, fast asleep.
Presently it burnt up brightly, and I saw that they too, five of them
altogether, were quite dead. One was a baby. I dropped the match in a
hurry, and was making my way from the hut as quick as I could go, when I
caught sight of two bright eyes staring out of a corner. Thinking it was
a wild cat, or some such animal, I redoubled my haste, when suddenly
a voice near the eyes began first to mutter, and then to send up a
succession of awful yells.

“Hastily I lit another match, and perceived that the eyes belonged to
an old woman, wrapped up in a greasy leather garment. Taking her by
the arm, I dragged her out, for she could not, or would not, come by
herself, and the stench was overpowering me. Such a sight as she was--a
bag of bones, covered over with black, shrivelled parchment. The only
white thing about her was her wool, and she seemed to be pretty well
dead except for her eyes and her voice. She thought that I was a devil
come to take her, and that is why she yelled so. Well, I got her down to
the waggon, and gave her a ‘tot’ of Cape smoke, and then, as soon as it
was ready, poured about a pint of beef-tea down her throat, made from
the flesh of a blue vilderbeeste I had killed the day before, and after
that she brightened up wonderfully. She could talk Zulu--indeed, it
turned out that she had run away from Zululand in T’Chaka’s time--and
she told me that all the people whom I had seen had died of fever. When
they had died the other inhabitants of the kraal had taken the cattle
and gone away, leaving the poor old woman, who was helpless from age and
infirmity, to perish of starvation or disease, as the case might be. She
had been sitting there for three days among the bodies when I found her.
I took her on to the next kraal, and gave the headman a blanket to look
after her, promising him another if I found her well when I came back. I
remember that he was much astonished at my parting with two blankets for
the sake of such a worthless old creature. ‘Why did I not leave her in
the bush?’ he asked. Those people carry the doctrine of the survival of
the fittest to its extreme, you see.

“It was the night after I had got rid of the old woman that I made my
first acquaintance with my friend yonder,” and he nodded towards the
skull that seemed to be grinning down at us in the shadow of the wide
mantel-shelf. “I had trekked from dawn till eleven o’clock--a long
trek--but I wanted to get on, and had turned the oxen out to graze,
sending the voorlooper to look after them, my intention being to inspan
again about six o’clock, and trek with the moon till ten. Then I got
into the waggon, and had a good sleep till half-past two or so in the
afternoon, when I rose and cooked some meat, and had my dinner, washing
it down with a pannikin of black coffee--for it was difficult to get
preserved milk in those days. Just as I had finished, and the driver, a
man called Tom, was washing up the things, in comes the young scoundrel
of a voorlooper driving one ox before him.

“‘Where are the other oxen?’ I asked.

“‘Koos!’ he said, ‘Koos! the other oxen have gone away. I turned my back
for a minute, and when I looked round again they were all gone except
Kaptein, here, who was rubbing his back against a tree.’

“‘You mean that you have been asleep, and let them stray, you villain. I
will rub your back against a stick,’ I answered, feeling very angry, for
it was not a pleasant prospect to be stuck up in that fever trap for a
week or so while we were hunting for the oxen. ‘Off you go, and you too,
Tom, and mind you don’t come back till you have found them. They have
trekked back along the Middelburg Road, and are a dozen miles off by
now, I’ll be bound. Now, no words; go both of you.’

“Tom, the driver, swore, and caught the lad a hearty kick, which he
richly deserved, and then, having tied old Kaptein up to the disselboom
with a reim, they took their assegais and sticks, and started. I would
have gone too, only I knew that somebody must look after the waggon, and
I did not like to leave either of the boys with it at night. I was in a
very bad temper, indeed, although I was pretty well used to these sort
of occurrences, and soothed myself by taking a rifle and going to kill
something. For a couple of hours I poked about without seeing anything
that I could get a shot at, but at last, just as I was again within
seventy yards of the waggon, I put up an old Impala ram from behind a
mimosa thorn. He ran straight for the waggon, and it was not till he was
passing within a few feet of it that I could get a decent shot at him.
Then I pulled, and caught him half-way down the spine; over he went,
dead as a door-nail, and a pretty shot it was, though I ought not to say
it. This little incident put me into rather a better humour, especially
as the buck had rolled over right against the after-part of the waggon,
so I had only to gut him, fix a reim round his legs, and haul him up. By
the time I had done this the sun was down, and the full moon was up, and
a beautiful moon it was. And then there came down that wonderful hush
which sometimes falls over the African bush in the early hours of the
night. No beast was moving, and no bird called. Not a breath of air
stirred the quiet trees, and the shadows did not even quiver, they only
grew. It was very oppressive and very lonely, for there was not a sign
of the cattle or the boys. I was quite thankful for the society of old
Kaptein, who was lying down contentedly against the disselboom, chewing
the cud with a good conscience.

“Presently, however, Kaptein began to get restless. First he snorted,
then he got up and snorted again. I could not make it out, so like a
fool I got down off the waggon-box to have a look round, thinking it
might be the lost oxen coming.

“Next instant I regretted it, for all of a sudden I heard a roar and saw
something yellow flash past me and light on poor Kaptein. Then came
a bellow of agony from the ox, and a crunch as the lion put his teeth
through the poor brute’s neck, and I began to realize what had happened.
My rifle was in the waggon, and my first thought being to get hold of
it, I turned and made a bolt for it. I got my foot on the wheel and
flung my body forward on to the waggon, and there I stopped as if I were
frozen, and no wonder, for as I was about to spring up I heard the lion
behind me, and next second I felt the brute, ay, as plainly as I can
feel this table. I felt him, I say, sniffing at my left leg that was
hanging down.

“My word! I did feel queer; I don’t think that I ever felt so queer
before. I dared not move for the life of me, and the odd thing was
that I seemed to lose power over my leg, which had an insane sort of
inclination to kick out of its own mere motion--just as hysterical
people want to laugh when they ought to be particularly solemn. Well,
the lion sniffed and sniffed, beginning at my ankle and slowly nosing
away up to my thigh. I thought that he was going to get hold then, but
he did not. He only growled softly, and went back to the ox. Shifting my
head a little I got a full view of him. He was about the biggest lion
I ever saw, and I have seen a great many, and he had a most tremendous
black mane. What his teeth were like you can see--look there, pretty big
ones, ain’t they? Altogether he was a magnificent animal, and as I lay
there sprawling on the fore-tongue of the waggon, it occurred to me that
he would look uncommonly well in a cage. He stood there by the carcass
of poor Kaptein, and deliberately disembowelled him as neatly as a
butcher could have done. All this while I dared not move, for he kept
lifting his head and keeping an eye on me as he licked his bloody chops.
When he had cleared Kaptein out he opened his mouth and roared, and I am
not exaggerating when I say that the sound shook the waggon. Instantly
there came back an answering roar.

“‘Heavens!’ I thought, ‘there is his mate.’

“Hardly was the thought out of my head when I caught sight in the
moonlight of the lioness bounding along through the long grass, and
after her a couple of cubs about the size of mastiffs. She stopped
within a few feet of my head, and stood, waved her tail, and fixed me
with her glowing yellow eyes; but just as I thought that it was all over
she turned and began to feed on Kaptein, and so did the cubs. There were
four of them within eight feet of me, growling and quarrelling, rending
and tearing, and crunching poor Kaptein’s bones; and there I lay shaking
with terror, and the cold perspiration pouring out of me, feeling like
another Daniel come to judgment in a new sense of the phrase. Presently
the cubs had eaten their fill, and began to get restless. One went round
to the back of the waggon and pulled at the Impala buck that hung there,
and the other came round my way and commenced the sniffing game at my
leg. Indeed, he did more than that, for my trouser being hitched up a
little, he began to lick the bare skin with his rough tongue. The more
he licked the more he liked it, to judge from his increased vigour and
the loud purring noise he made. Then I knew that the end had come, for
in another second his file-like tongue would have rasped through the
skin of my leg--which was luckily pretty tough--and have tasted the
blood, and then there would be no chance for me. So I just lay there and
thought of my sins, and prayed to the Almighty, and reflected that after
all life was a very enjoyable thing.

“Then all of a sudden I heard a crashing of bushes and the shouting
and whistling of men, and there were the two boys coming back with the
cattle, which they had found trekking along all together. The lions
lifted their heads and listened, then bounded off without a sound--and I
fainted.

“The lions came back no more that night, and by the next morning my
nerves had got pretty straight again; but I was full of wrath when I
thought of all that I had gone through at the hands, or rather noses,
of those four brutes, and of the fate of my after-ox Kaptein. He was a
splendid ox, and I was very fond of him. So wroth was I that like a
fool I determined to attack the whole family of them. It was worthy of
a greenhorn out on his first hunting trip; but I did it nevertheless.
Accordingly after breakfast, having rubbed some oil upon my leg, which
was very sore from the cub’s tongue, I took the driver, Tom, who did not
half like the business, and having armed myself with an ordinary double
No. 12 smoothbore, the first breechloader I ever had, I started. I took
the smoothbore because it shot a bullet very well; and my experience has
been that a round ball from a smoothbore is quite as effective against a
lion as an express bullet. The lion is soft, and not a difficult animal
to finish if you hit him anywhere in the body. A buck takes far more
killing.

“Well, I started, and the first thing I set to work to do was to try to
discover whereabouts the brutes lay up for the day. About three hundred
yards from the waggon was the crest of a rise covered with single
mimosa trees, dotted about in a park-like fashion, and beyond this was
a stretch of open plain running down to a dry pan, or waterhole, which
covered about an acre of ground, and was densely clothed with reeds,
now in the sere and yellow leaf. From the further edge of this pan the
ground sloped up again to a great cleft, or nullah, which had been cut
out by the action of the water, and was pretty thickly sprinkled with
bush, amongst which grew some large trees, I forget of what sort.

“It at once struck me that the dry pan would be a likely place to find
my friends in, as there is nothing a lion is fonder of than lying up
in reeds, through which he can see things without being seen himself.
Accordingly thither I went and prospected. Before I had got half-way
round the pan I found the remains of a blue vilderbeeste that had
evidently been killed within the last three or four days and partially
devoured by lions; and from other indications about I was soon assured
that if the family were not in the pan that day they spent a good deal
of their spare time there. But if there, the question was how to get
them out; for it was clearly impossible to think of going in after
them unless one was quite determined to commit suicide. Now there was a
strong wind blowing from the direction of the waggon, across the reedy
pan towards the bush-clad kloof or donga, and this first gave me the
idea of firing the reeds, which, as I think I told you, were pretty dry.
Accordingly Tom took some matches and began starting little fires to the
left, and I did the same to the right. But the reeds were still green
at the bottom, and we should never have got them well alight had it not
been for the wind, which grew stronger and stronger as the sun climbed
higher, and forced the fire into them. At last, after half-an-hour’s
trouble, the flames got a hold, and began to spread out like a fan,
whereupon I went round to the further side of the pan to wait for the
lions, standing well out in the open, as we stood at the copse to-day
where you shot the woodcock. It was a rather risky thing to do, but I
used to be so sure of my shooting in those days that I did not so
much as mind the risk. Scarcely had I got round when I heard the reeds
parting before the onward rush of some animal. ‘Now for it,’ said I. On
it came. I could see that it was yellow, and prepared for action, when
instead of a lion out bounded a beautiful reit bok which had been lying
in the shelter of the pan. It must, by the way, have been a reit bok of
a peculiarly confiding nature to lay itself down with the lion, like the
lamb of prophecy, but I suppose the reeds were thick, and that it kept a
long way off.

“Well, I let the reit bok go, and it went like the wind, and kept my
eyes fixed upon the reeds. The fire was burning like a furnace now; the
flames crackling and roaring as they bit into the reeds, sending spouts
of fire twenty feet and more into the air, and making the hot air dance
above it in a way that was perfectly dazzling. But the reeds were
still half green, and created an enormous quantity of smoke, which came
rolling towards me like a curtain, lying very low on account of the
wind. Presently, above the crackling of the fire, I heard a startled
roar, then another and another. So the lions were at home.

“I was beginning to get excited now, for, as you fellows know, there
is nothing in experience to warm up your nerves like a lion at close
quarters, unless it is a wounded buffalo; and I became still more so
when I made out through the smoke that the lions were all moving about
on the extreme edge of the reeds. Occasionally they would pop their
heads out like rabbits from a burrow, and then, catching sight of me
standing about fifty yards away, draw them back again. I knew that it
must be getting pretty warm behind them, and that they could not keep
the game up for long; and I was not mistaken, for suddenly all four of
them broke cover together, the old black-maned lion leading by a few
yards. I never saw a more splendid sight in all my hunting experience
than those four lions bounding across the veldt, overshadowed by the
dense pall of smoke and backed by the fiery furnace of the burning
reeds.

“I reckoned that they would pass, on their way to the bushy kloof,
within about five and twenty yards of me, so, taking a long breath, I
got my gun well on to the lion’s shoulder--the black-maned one--so as to
allow for an inch or two of motion, and catch him through the heart.
I was on, dead on, and my finger was just beginning to tighten on the
trigger, when suddenly I went blind--a bit of reed-ash had drifted into
my right eye. I danced and rubbed, and succeeded in clearing it more or
less just in time to see the tail of the last lion vanishing round the
bushes up the kloof.

“If ever a man was mad I was that man. It was too bad; and such a shot
in the open! However, I was not going to be beaten, so I just turned and
marched for the kloof. Tom, the driver, begged and implored me not
to go, but though as a personal rule I never pretend to be very brave
(which I am not), I was determined that I would either kill those lions
or they should kill me. So I told Tom that he need not come unless he
liked, but I was going; and being a plucky fellow, a Swazi by birth,
he shrugged his shoulders, muttered that I was mad or bewitched, and
followed doggedly in my tracks.

“We soon reached the kloof, which was about three hundred yards in
length and but sparsely wooded, and then the real fun began. There might
be a lion behind every bush--there certainly were four lions somewhere;
the delicate question was, where. I peeped and poked and looked in every
possible direction, with my heart in my mouth, and was at last rewarded
by catching a glimpse of something yellow moving behind a bush. At the
same moment, from another bush opposite me out burst one of the cubs
and galloped back towards the burnt pan. I whipped round and let drive a
snap shot that tipped him head over heels, breaking his back within two
inches of the root of the tail, and there he lay helpless but glaring.
Tom afterwards killed him with his assegai. I opened the breech of the
gun and hurriedly pulled out the old case, which, to judge from what
ensued, must, I suppose, have burst and left a portion of its fabric
sticking to the barrel. At any rate, when I tried to get in the new
cartridge it would only enter half-way; and--would you believe it?--this
was the moment that the lioness, attracted no doubt by the outcry of her
cub, chose to put in an appearance. There she stood, twenty paces or so
from me, lashing her tail and looking just as wicked as it is possible
to conceive. Slowly I stepped backwards, trying to push in the new case,
and as I did so she moved on in little runs, dropping down after each
run. The danger was imminent, and the case would not go in. At the
moment I oddly enough thought of the cartridge maker, whose name I will
not mention, and earnestly hoped that if the lion got _me_ some condign
punishment would overtake _him_. It would not go in, so I tried to pull
it out. It would not come out either, and my gun was useless if I could
not shut it to use the other barrel. I might as well have had no gun.

“Meanwhile I was walking backward, keeping my eye on the lioness, who
was creeping forward on her belly without a sound, but lashing her tail
and keeping her eye on me; and in it I saw that she was coming in a
few seconds more. I dashed my wrist and the palm of my hand against the
brass rim of the cartridge till the blood poured from them--look, there
are the scars of it to this day!”

Here Quatermain held up his right hand to the light and showed us four
or five white cicatrices just where the wrist is set into the hand.

“But it was not of the slightest use,” he went on; “the cartridge would
not move. I only hope that no other man will ever be put in such an
awful position. The lioness gathered herself together, and I gave myself
up for lost, when suddenly Tom shouted out from somewhere in my rear--

“‘You are walking on to the wounded cub; turn to the right.’

“I had the sense, dazed as I was, to take the hint, and slewing round at
right-angles, but still keeping my eyes on the lioness, I continued my
backward walk.

“To my intense relief, with a low growl she straightened herself,
turned, and bounded further up the kloof.

“‘Come on, Inkoos,’ said Tom, ‘let’s get back to the waggon.’

“‘All right, Tom,’ I answered. ‘I will when I have killed those three
other lions,’ for by this time I was bent on shooting them as I never
remember being bent on anything before or since. ‘You can go if you
like, or you can get up a tree.’

“He considered the position a little, and then he very wisely got up a
tree. I wish that I had done the same.

“Meanwhile I had found my knife, which had an extractor in it, and
succeeded after some difficulty in pulling out the cartridge which had
so nearly been the cause of my death, and removing the obstruction in
the barrel. It was very little thicker than a postage-stamp; certainly
not thicker than a piece of writing-paper. This done, I loaded the gun,
bound a handkerchief round my wrist and hand to staunch the flowing of
the blood, and started on again.

“I had noticed that the lioness went into a thick green bush, or rather
a cluster of bushes, growing near the water, about fifty yards higher
up, for there was a little stream running down the kloof, and I walked
towards this bush. When I got there, however, I could see nothing, so I
took up a big stone and threw it into the bushes. I believe that it hit
the other cub, for out it came with a rush, giving me a broadside shot,
of which I promptly availed myself, knocking it over dead. Out, too,
came the lioness like a flash of light, but quick as she went I managed
to put the other bullet into her ribs, so that she rolled right over
three times like a shot rabbit. I instantly got two more cartridges
into the gun, and as I did so the lioness rose again and came crawling
towards me on her fore-paws, roaring and groaning, and with such an
expression of diabolical fury on her countenance as I have not often
seen. I shot her again through the chest, and she fell over on to her
side quite dead.

“That was the first and last time that I ever killed a brace of lions
right and left, and, what is more, I never heard of anybody else doing
it. Naturally I was considerably pleased with myself, and having again
loaded up, I went on to look for the black-maned beauty who had killed
Kaptein. Slowly, and with the greatest care, I proceeded up the kloof,
searching every bush and tuft of grass as I went. It was wonderfully
exciting work, for I never was sure from one moment to another but that
he would be on me. I took comfort, however, from the reflection that a
lion rarely attacks a man--rarely, I say; sometimes he does, as you will
see--unless he is cornered or wounded. I must have been nearly an hour
hunting after that lion. Once I thought I saw something move in a clump
of tambouki grass, but I could not be sure, and when I trod out the
grass I could not find him.

“At last I worked up to the head of the kloof, which made a
_cul-de-sac_. It was formed of a wall of rock about fifty feet high.
Down this rock trickled a little waterfall, and in front of it, some
seventy feet from its face, was a great piled-up mass of boulders, in
the crevices and on the top of which grew ferns, grasses, and stunted
bushes. This mass was about twenty-five feet high. The sides of the
kloof here were also very steep. Well, I came to the top of the nullah
and looked all round. No signs of the lion. Evidently I had either
overlooked him further down, or he had escaped right away. It was very
vexatious; but still three lions were not a bad bag for one gun before
dinner, and I was fain to be content. Accordingly I departed back again,
making my way round the isolated pillar of boulders, beginning to feel,
as I did so, that I was pretty well done up with excitement and fatigue,
and should be more so before I had skinned those three lions. When I had
got, as nearly as I could judge, about eighteen yards past the pillar or
mass of boulders, I turned to have another look round. I have a pretty
sharp eye, but I could see nothing at all.

“Then, on a sudden, I saw something sufficiently alarming. On the top
of the mass of boulders, opposite to me, standing out clear against
the rocks beyond, was the huge black-maned lion. He had been crouching
there, and now arose as though by magic. There he stood lashing his
tail, just like a living reproduction of the animal on the gateway of
Northumberland House that I have seen in a picture. But he did not stand
long. Before I could fire--before I could do more than get the gun to my
shoulder--he sprang straight up and out from the rock, and driven by the
impetus of that one mighty bound came hurtling through the air towards
me.

“Heavens! how grand he looked, and how awful! High into the air he flew,
describing a great arch. Just as he touched the highest point of his
spring I fired. I did not dare to wait, for I saw that he would clear
the whole space and land right upon me. Without a sight, almost without
aim, I fired, as one would fire a snap shot at a snipe. The bullet told,
for I distinctly heard its thud above the rushing sound caused by the
passage of the lion through the air. Next second I was swept to the
ground (luckily I fell into a low, creeper-clad bush, which broke the
shock) and the lion was on the top of me, and the next those great white
teeth of his had met in my thigh--I heard them grate against the bone. I
yelled out in agony, for I did not feel in the least benumbed and happy,
like Dr. Livingstone--who, by the way, I knew very well--and gave myself
up for dead. But suddenly, as I did so, the lion’s grip on my thigh
loosened, and he stood over me, swaying to and fro, his huge mouth, from
which the blood was gushing, wide open. Then he roared, and the sound
shook the rocks.

“To and fro he swung, and suddenly the great head dropped on me,
knocking all the breath from my body, and he was dead. My bullet had
entered in the centre of his chest and passed out on the right side of
the spine about half-way down the back.

“The pain of my wound kept me from fainting, and as soon as I got my
breath I managed to drag myself from under him. Thank heavens, his great
teeth had not crushed my thigh-bone; but I was losing a great deal of
blood, and had it not been for the timely arrival of Tom, with whose
aid I loosed the handkerchief from my wrist and tied it round my leg,
twisting it tight with a stick, I think that I should have bled to
death.

“Well, it was a just reward for my folly in trying to tackle a family
of lions single-handed. The odds were too long. I have been lame ever
since, and shall be to my dying day; in the month of March the wound
always troubles me a great deal, and every three years it breaks out
raw.

“I need scarcely add that I never traded the lot of ivory at Sikukuni’s.
Another man got it--a German--and made five hundred pounds out of it
after paying expenses. I spent the month on the broad of my back, and
was a cripple for six months after that. And now I’ve told you the yarn,
so I will have a drop of Hollands and go to bed. Good-night to you all,
good-night!”





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