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

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 Long Odds, by H. Rider Haggard

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.

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"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

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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.

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"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

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 Long Odds, by H. Rider Haggard
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.'

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"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.

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 Long Odds, by H. Rider Haggard
"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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