Very few instances are known of Elaps bite, but those few unquestionably set this ornamental creature in a class by itself, among American Ophidia, for “results.” Out of eight well-authenticated cases of Elaps bite, six of the victims died. This is believed to indicate a falsely large percentage, however, the scientific estimate of mortality being somewhere between twenty-five and fifty per cent.
A government scientist tells me of a curious result from coral-snake bite which came under his notice. The victim, who was handling the reptile preparatory to photographing it, apparently overstepped the bounds of its habitual forbearance, for it fastened upon his finger with such determination that it had to be pried off. The man soon became unconscious, but rallied, and, after three days of dubious condition, recovered. Every year since, at about the anniversary of the bite, an ulcer forms upon the finger and the nail sloughs off. I have heard of similar recurrent effects from crotaline poisoning, but none scientifically attested, as is this phenomenon.
Before passing from the subject of snakes, let me make one point clear. While the venomous snakes of this country are by no means “deadly” in the ordinary sense of the term, their bite is always serious, both in its immediate effects and in the possibility of after effects. The bitten person should get to a physician at once. The immediate treatment is prompt incision and sucking of the wound. Permanganate of potash for rubbing into the bitten place should always be carried by persons traveling in a snake-infested country. If the bite is on a limb, a light ligature will check the spread of the venom. Use whisky sparingly, if at all, and then only in case of complete collapse.
The local treatments are most effective while the venom is still around the site of the bite, and will reduce the injurious effects considerably. But after half an hour or so the absorption of the venom becomes more general and the local treatments ineffective. When the venom once enters into general circulation no chemicals or medication can neutralize its effects, except a specific antivenin, such as has been prepared by Dr. Noguchi at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. Antivenin is the only antidote that can counteract the action of venom anywhere in the body. It finds the venom wherever it is present and neutralizes it there, without producing any ill effects on the system.
GILA MONSTER NOT SO MONSTROUS
Dissension and discussion have raged for years about the hideous head of the Gila monster. This great lizard of the Southwest has been pronounced absolutely deadly by one set of partisans, and absolutely harmless by another. Somewhere between lies the truth. If any human being has actually been bitten by a heloderma, the event has either escaped notice or has been so hedged about with obstructive legend as to have forfeited scientific credence. But the saurian itself has been studied and dissected, and its venom has been analyzed. The venom is related to snake poison, but is neither crotaline nor elapine. From animal experiments it is thought that it might be fatal to man under unfavorable conditions. There are no fangs proper. The poison gland is in the lower jaw, instead of in the upper, as in snakes, and its product is projected through small ducts which open in the gums outside the teeth. The Gila monster has the grip of a bulldog. Torture will not loosen its hold, once fastened on. It is through this intimate contact that the venom works into the wounds.
Fortunately, the lizard is slow to anger, and prefers flight to battle, so it is likely to be long before science has an opportunity of studying the effect of its envenomed jaw-clamp upon man. There are a few vaguely rumored reports of prospectors having perished, in the desert, of Gila monster poison, but these are so confused with symptoms suspiciously resembling alcoholic poisoning as to lead Dr. R. W. Shufeldt, an authority upon the Reptilia, to remark that “a quart of raw whisky, practically given at one dose, may prove more fatal than the bite of ten helodermas.”
Almost any kind of an insect bite or sting MAY prove fatal. So may a pin scratch, if the blood of the subject be in bad enough condition. There is a well-substantiated case of a trained nurse who died from blood poisoning following a mosquito bite. Ant bite has resulted fatally, as has a single sting from the common wasp. No one, however, considers these everyday insects as “deadly.” But substitute “scorpion” for “ant,” and “centipede” for “wasp,” and shrieks of dismay rise from the general throat. Yet perhaps there is no other variety of harmful creature whose reputation rests upon so meager a foundation as that of these two.
True, an El Paso report claims that a man stung by a whip scorpion died in twelve hours; but the details are so vague as to be in a high degree unconvincing. Dr. Eugene Murray-Aaron, a witness of unimpeachable scientific competency, describes the sting, after several personal encounters with the vigorous tropical species, as no worse than that of a large hornet. Dr. L. B. Rowland, of Florida, says: “My wife has been stung several times [by the common scorpion]. It is like a wasp sting, only.”
THE SCORPION’S STING
The Mexican scorpion enjoys an evil repute, which, from personal observation, I consider greatly exaggerated. Stewart Edward White was so obliging as to afford me excellent opportunity of judging, in the course of a recent hunting trip which we took together in a hot and remote Mexican desert. Mr. White, in the process of disrobing, sat down upon a brown scorpion, an inch and a half long. The scorpion punctured Mr. White twice. I noted his symptoms. They were chiefly surprise and indignation. Within half an hour he was asleep, and on the following day he was riding a mule. The scorpion, however, died.
With respect to the centipede, satisfactory data are difficult to obtain. Some scientists whose observations are worthy of note state that the legs of this curious creature secrete a poison, and that their trail over human flesh is marked by a sort of rash, sometimes followed by fever. As showing that this is not an invariable phenomenon, I may set the circumstantial account given me by Captain Robert Kemp Wright, who, at his place at Pitch Lake, Trinidad, saw a good-sized centipede crawl across the forehead of his sleeping son. Not daring to make a move, as the centipede is supposed to strike very swiftly, Captain Wright was compelled to stand still while it slowly made its way to the pillow and thence to the floor, where it was killed. The boy, who had neither waked nor moved, showed absolutely no trace of the reptile’s course.
THE DEADLY TARANTULA–IN PRINT
The only direct evidence which has come to me regarding the bite of the hundred-legged crawler was from an English naturalist whom I met in Venezuela. He was bitten on the ankle by a centipede nearly a foot long. So severe was the laceration that his sock was clotted with blood before he could get it off. The two punctures were marked. Almost immediately the ankle began to swell. The pain he describes as being equal to a bad toothache. It kept him awake all that night. He had some fever, which, however, he attributes rather to the loss of sleep than to any specific action of the poison, as there were no other general symptoms. In the morning the pain had abated a good deal, and he believes that he could have gone about his pursuits had he been able to get his sock and shoe on. He noted some discoloration about the wound. Late in the afternoon he was hobbling about. A week in a carpet slipper was the extent of disability which he suffered. On these evidences it would seem just, for the present, to set down the scorpion and the centipede as painful, rather than dangerous, assailants.
Diseased imagination could invent no creature more horrific of appearance than the tarantula. Its bristling and hostile aspect, the swift ferocity of its rush, its great size, and its enthusiastic preference for combat as against flight, are sufficient to account for the fear and respect in which it is generally held. But, though several species of the huge spider are native to the United States, and others frequently drop out of banana bunches from South or Central America, to the discomfiture of the unsuspecting grocer, no authentic instance of death from tarantula poison in this country is obtainable. St. Louis papers please copy, particularly that one which, several years ago, announced in appropriately black headlines:
IN TWO WEEKS Three Men Have Died From Bites of Tarantulas,
proceeding to explain that the victims were banana handlers in the wholesale fruit district. No names were supplied–a common phenomenon in this class of obituary notice. Search in the coroner’s records failed to bring to light any case of the sort, and an exhaustive inquiry in the fruit district was equally unproductive. The report was a pure fake.
Apparently of the same nature is the “news story” of a Californian who, presumably mistaking a tarantula for a fragrant floweret, was bitten on the nose and “died in great agony.” That, of course, is the proper way to die under such circumstances. They all do it–in print.
Now let us see about the “agony.” Herbert H. Smith, the naturalist and collector, saw a man bitten on the bare foot by a tarantula (Mygale) so hard as to draw blood. There was very little swelling, and the man paid no heed to the occurrence, but went on with his work.
I have talked with a Southern Pacific Railroad fireman who was jabbed on the wrist by a large tarantula. Some years before, he had been stung on the cheek by a “bald” hornet. He wasn’t inclined to make any choice between the two except that the tarantula (not the wound) “looked a d—-sight more scary.” He didn’t let the bite interfere with his job, even for the day.
On the other hand, Dr. Murray-Aaron records serious symptoms following two bites upon the hand by a large female trapdoor tarantula; pain comparable to that of the worst earache, involuntary twitching of arms, legs, lips, and tongue, great swelling and discoloration of the hand and forearm, and considerable suffering for four days, with occasionally recurrent pains for a month. This, however, was in Haiti. And even there, he believes, death never follows tarantula bite unless the subject is in a depleted state of resistance from blood-disease or other cause.
Under the heading “Fatal Spider Bite” there is a considerable and interesting newspaper bibliography. The details do not analyze well. Often the name of the supposed victim doesn’t appear; and where names and specifications are given, the evidence is hardly sufficient, as a rule, to convict the insect of any crime more serious than mayhem. For example, a young woman in Brooklyn awoke one morning to find a swollen spot on her body. On the bed was (according to allegation) a spider. Some ten days later she died. For a long period she had been in ill health. Yet the death was credited to the spider, though specific symptoms of venomous poisoning were lacking.
The instance of a young woman in an Eastern state is significant. Thrusting her foot into an old slipper, she felt a sharp jab upon the point of her index digit. Upon hasty removal of the footgear, she saw, or supposed she saw, a large and ferocious spider dart forth. This, to her mind, was evidence both conclusive and damning. Seizing upon the carving knife, she promptly cut off her perfectly good toe, bound up the wound, and sent for the doctor, thereby blossoming out in next day’s print as a “Heroine who had Saved her own life by her Marvelous Presence of Mind.” The thoughtful will wonder, however, whether the lady wouldn’t have got at the real root of the matter by cutting off her head instead of her toe.
SPIDER HYSTERIA
Imagination and terror undoubtedly account for certain general symptoms in this class of injury. Colonel Nicholas Pike, a competent observer, records a case of a man slapping his hand down upon a window sill and feeling a lively stab in the palm. At the same moment a small spider ran across the back of his fingers and was captured. There was a distinct puncture in the hand. Here, then, was a definite case, where the wound and the insect were both in evidence. But examination of the arachnid’s fangs satisfied Colonel Pike that they were far too small and weak to penetrate the tough skin where the wound was. Meantime the victim exhibited the classic symptoms of venomous poisoning: numbness, nausea, chills, and threatened collapse. A physician, being summoned, examined both the victim and the accused, and took Colonel Pike’s view that the spider was innocent. The man was wrathful, with the indignation of terror. He said he guessed he knew whether he was bitten or not, and that the physician’s business was to eschew idle speculations and go ahead and save his life if it wasn’t already too late. Thereupon the doctor opened up the wound and extracted a section of a fine needle. The other half was found sticking in the window sill where a careless seamstress had fixed it. The spider had been a fortuitous arrival. The man made one of the quickest recoveries recorded.
THE “RED-SPOT”–DANGEROUS
Strangely enough, the one really dangerous spider on the American continent is small, obscure, and practically unknown to popular or journalistic hysteria. Latrodectus mactans is its scientific name. It is about the size of a large pea, black with a red spot on the back–a useful danger signal–and spins a small web in outhouses or around wood-piles. So far as is known, its poison is the most virulent and powerful, drop for drop, secreted by any living creature. Cobra virus, in the minute quantity which the Latrodectus’s glands contain, would probably have no appreciable effect upon man; whereas the tiny spider’s venom, in the volume injected by the cobra’s stroke, would slay a herd of elephants. Were this little-known crawler as large as the common black hunting spider of our gardens and lawns, its bite would be almost invariably fatal. Happily, the “red-spot’s” fangs, being small and weak, can with difficulty penetrate the skin, and are able to inject venom in dangerous quantity only when the bite is inflicted upon some tender-skinned portion of the body. Nevertheless, fatalities consequent upon the bite of this insect are sufficiently well attested to take rank as established scientific facts.
One of the most detailed comes from an intelligent farmer of Greensboro, North Carolina. A workman in his employ, while hauling wood, brushed at something crawling upon his neck and felt a sharp, stinging sensation. He found a small, black spider with a red spot. This was at 8.30 A.M. Presently, ten small white pimples appeared about the bitten spot, though no puncture was visible and there was no swelling. The pain soon passed, but returned in three hours and became general, finally settling in the abdomen and producing violent cramps. At one o’clock the man had a spasmodic attack. Two hours later he had so far recovered as to be able to go back to work, for an hour. Then the spasms took him again; he sank into coma, and died between ten and eleven o’clock that evening, about fourteen hours after the bite. At no time were there local symptoms or swelling, other than the slight eruption, but the neck, left arm, and breast are reported as having assumed a stonelike hardness.
The same farmer had seen, three years previous, a negro who had been bitten upon the ankle by a “red-spot” and who suffered from diminishingly severe spasmodic attacks for three weeks. The white pimples appeared in this case also. The negro recovered, but the eruption reappeared for years thereafter whenever he was overheated.
Recoveries from Latrodectus bite are much more common, in the records, than deaths. Dr. Corson, of Savannah, Georgia, reports six cases, characterized by agonizing pains, spasmodic contractions like those of tetanus, and grave general symptoms. All recovered. From Anaheim, California, a fatal case is reported by Dr. Bickford, death occurring twenty hours after the bite. William A. Ball, of San Bernardino, California, gives a vivid account of his sensations after being bitten on the groin by a red-spotted spider, the data being attested by his physician. Shortly after being bitten, he began to suffer great agony, with convulsive contractions of the muscles.
“The pains in my hip-joints, chest, and thighs grew rapidly more violent, until it seemed that the bones in these parts of my body were being crushed to fragments.” He was seriously ill for ten days.
WORSE TEXAN THE “DEADLY” COPPERHEAD
It may be that only under certain uncomprehended conditions is the venom of the Latrodectus effective. Inoculation of guinea pigs with the poison has been without any resultant symptoms. Scientific experimenters have suffered themselves to be bitten and have experienced no ill effects. The foreign cousins of the American species, however, have as evil a repute as the “mactans.” The “katipo,” found in sedges on the beach of New Zealand, is dreaded by the Maoris, who traditionally refuse to sleep nearer than half a stone’s throw from the water, that being the extent of range of the spider. The Latrodecti of Corsica, Algeria, and France are infamous in the lore of the country folk, which fact must be regarded as strongly evidential, when their insignificant appearance is taken into account.
Only in America is there no popular fear of this really formidable little creature. Yet it is found in almost every part of the United States, though by no means one of the commoner spiders. In the past five years I have seen two specimens at my country place in central New York, and have heard of a dozen others. If people understood generally that this rather ornamental insect is both more perilous to life and health, and rather more prone to attack human beings, than the superstitiously dreaded “deadly” copperhead, there would probably be a heavy mortality in the Latrodectus family at the hands of energetic house-cleaners.
THE RISE OF THE KISSING-BUG
Years ago the United States Bureau of Entomology received from an exasperated clergyman in Georgia a dead insect, enclosed in this note:
“Prof. Riley: What is this devil? He sailed down on my hedge. I took hold of his lone front leg, and as quick as lightning he speared me under my thumb nail and I dropped him. My thumb and whole arm are still paining me . . . “
The miscreant was a fine specimen of Reduvius personatus, the cone-nosed blood-sucker, soon thereafter to achieve heights of newspaper notoriety together with its cousin, Melanolestes picipes, as the “kissing-bug.” How many persons died (in type) from kissing-bug bites in the year of enlightened civilization, 1899, will never be known. But from far and near, from California and Connecticut and the Carolinas, from Minnesota and Maryland and Maine, came startling reports of this hitherto unfamed creature’s depredations upon the human countenance. Thereby the spider family was relieved of much unmerited odium, for it is more than suspected by entomologists that a large proportion of so-called spider bites are really the work of the more vicious but less formidable-appearing kissing-bug, as is often evidenced by the nature of the puncture.
The kissing-bug is about half an inch in length, flat-backed, shaped in geometrically regular angles, and armed with a large, hard beak. It is this beak which does the damage, for the kissing-bug is a fighter and will risk a prod at anything that gives it cause of offense. Testimony is not lacking that it sometimes punctures the human epidermis with a view to obtaining blood at first hand instead of from its natural prey.
But the curious feature of the kissing-bug’s bite is its after effect. Neither the southern Reduvius nor the northern Melanolestes possesses any venom apparatus. Now, an insect without fangs (or sting), duct, and poison gland, can no more envenom the object of its attack than a fish can kick a man to death. Yet we find such authorities as Dr. L. O. Howard, the United States Entomologist, Professor Le Conte, Mr. Charles Drury, of Cincinnati, and others, including a mass of medical witnesses, declaring from first-hand observation that the kissing-bug bite causes much swelling and severe pain. Le Conte, indeed, compares the effect to snake bite, and states that people are seriously affected for a week. A case is recorded from Holland, South Carolina, where there were vomiting and marked weakness. Mr. Schwartz, an expert of the Bureau of Entomology at Washington, was bitten twice upon the hand and testifies to the painful effects. In 1899, when the species was very common in Washington, the Emergency Hospital had a long list of patients who appeared on the records under the heading, “Insect Bite.”
THE DECLINE OF THE KISSING-BUG
Thus was started the general “scare,” a reporter with a keen nose for news having made a legitimate “sensation” from the repeated entries on the hospital roster. From Washington it spread over the country, and became the topic of the day, until any insect bite or sting–mosquito, hornet, bedbug, or whatnot–was magnified by the hysteria of the patient and the credulousness of the public into a “dangerous” instance of kissing-bug poisoning. Reports of fatal cases, however, invariably proved to be canards.
For explanation of the marked local symptoms resultant upon attack by the insect, science has been hard put to it. The general symptoms, observed in a few cases, where violent, may probably be ascribed to shock and nervousness. But the marked swelling and pain cannot be thus dismissed. Medical men believe that the insect, in its various prowlings for food, thrusts its exploring beak into decaying animal and vegetable matter and thus, in a sense, so poisons it that when it comes into contact with human blood, a rapid local infection is set up–not through any specific poison, as in spider bite or bee sting, but by the agency of the putrefactive germs collected on the weapon.
Not the least interesting phase of the kissing-bug scare is the rapidity and completeness of its decadence. It is but ten years ago that the newspapers rang with it; that victims of the bite, in every city, were fleeing, white-faced and racked with forebodings, to doctor or hospital. To-day, both the Melanolestes and the “conenose” are abroad in the land. Doubtless, upon provocation, they are “spearing” others as they speared the outraged clergyman. But that’s all. The bepunctured ones do not seek the consolations of medical or journalistic attention. They put a little wet mud or peroxide on the place and let it go at that. Exit another bogy!
OUR REAL POISON PERIL
One venomous creature there is in this country which may justly be termed a public peril, in the widest sense. Proportionately to population, more victims fall to it yearly in the United States than to the dreaded cobra in India. Some twelve thousand Americans are killed every year by its bite. Three hundred thousand more are made seriously ill from the after effects. Unfortunately, the virus works so slowly that alarm is stilled. The victims do not sicken at once. The bite is forgotten; but ten days or two weeks after, the subject falls into a fever. His blood is poisoned within him. Eventually, in extreme cases, he becomes delirious, succumbs to a stupor, and dies.
Yet, because there is nothing horrific to the sensation-loving imagination in the malaria-bearing mosquito, public inertia or ignorance tolerates it with a grin and permits it to breed in city and country alike throughout the length and breadth of the nation. Compared with it, as a real menace, all the combined brood of snakes, scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas, and other pet bugaboos of our childish romanticism are utterly negligible; are as figment to reality, as shadow to substance. It is perhaps characteristic of our wryly humorous American temperament that we should have invested the unimportant danger with all the shuddering attributes of horror, and have made of the real peril a joke to be perennially hailed with laughter in a thousand thoughtless prints.
***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII October 1910 No. 4
Lassoing Wild Animals In Africa {pages 526-538}
By GUY H. SCULL
Field Manager of the Buffalo Jones African Expedition
II
SOMEHOW everything seemed to happen on moving day with the Buffalo Jones Expedition in East Africa. Exactly why this should have been it is impossible to tell. Perhaps the reason may be found in the fact that a considerable part of our time was occupied in moving. No doubt the circumstance could be traced to some such perfectly reasonable cause. But we chose to look upon it otherwise.
When an outfit like ours has been working for a while in the open country–especially when the undertaking has no precedent and the outcome is decidedly uncertain–the little happenings of each day gradually grow to have a peculiar significance of their own, and finally a brand-new set of superstitions is formed and half jokingly believed in by every one concerned. In this way an expedition comes to be regarded as lucky or unlucky, or lucky on certain days, or at certain hours of the day, or at certain periods of the moon. The wide reaches of the African veldt have something to do with it, perhaps.
These superstitions are temporary, local, and often purely personal affairs. Means, being a cowboy, believed that when he rode his big-boned bay the drive would be successful. The native dog-boy insisted that when the long-eared bloodhound and the little white terrier were coupled together on the march, the rest of the pack would come through without mishap. Loveless swore by a particular piece of rope, and Mac–which is short for Mohammed–discovered propitious omens on every conceivable occasion.
It was on the first day’s march into the Kedong Valley that we had roped the wart-hog. On the journey from Sewell’s Farm to Rugged Rocks we had rounded up and photographed the eland. Again, it was on the trek of March 8 to the Wangai River that we had caught our only glimpses of rhinoceros and lion–faint chances of making a capture, but still chances, and better than no signs at all.
And thus, merely because it had turned out so in the past every member of the expedition had come to entertain a semi-serious belief that something momentous was bound to happen on moving day.
A general feeling of expectancy pervaded the entire safari when we broke camp at the Wangai River at dawn of a hazy morning. The sky was clear of clouds, but behind the hills of the Mau escarpment a veldt fire had been burning for several days, so that a veil of smoke was seen hanging in the air as the dawn broadened into day. The smell of the burning veldt and the nearness of the fire lent an oppressive warmth to the still morning.
“You two boys had better carry your heavy ropes,” the Colonel said at starting. “We might meet something.”
We had finished with the Kedong and Rift valleys. We had hunted every corner of the district within striking distance of the water. And we had had success of a kind. Cheetah, eland, hartebeest, and serval-cat we had roped and tied and photographed. But the really big game had so far escaped us. For this reason we had decided to take the road over the Mau, where the smoke haze hung heavy, and so on into the Sotik country, where both lion and rhino were said to abound.
For the first ten miles of the march our way led across untraveled country, toward the two deep ruts in the veldt that were known as the wagon road. We had an extra ox-wagon with us now, in charge of Mr. Curry, an Africander, who lived with his partner on a farm on the border of the Sotik, and who on his return journey home with his wagon had agreed to help us carry supplies. Curry was slight and round-shouldered, with light yellow hair. His face was burned a bright red, excepting his nose, which was white where the skin was peeling. He had a peculiar, slow, drawling way of talking–when he talked at all, which was seldom. Being an inhabitant of the district into which we were going, he was naturally subjected at first to a number of questions in regard to the big game there.
“Plenty of rhino in your part of the world, I suppose?”
“Y–as,” drawled Curry.
“And lion, too, I imagine?”
“Y–as.”
“Ought to get some giraffe on the way, hadn’t we?”
“Y–as.”
“Rhino pretty scarce just now, though, aren’t they?”
“Y–as,” Curry answered placidly.
Thus it soon became apparent that Curry’s chief ambition was to agree pleasantly with whatever anybody said, which tended to discredit any information he had to impart. So, as a matter of course, the questions ceased, and when no more were asked him Curry’s conversation ceased also.
It was rough going for the ox-wagons those first ten miles, and they made slow time of it along the base of the hills. According to our custom on the march, the Colonel and the two cowboys, the picture department (composed of Kearton and Gobbet), and Ulyate (the white hunter) and myself rode in a widely extended line in front of the safari, sweeping the country for game. It was hot at the base of the hills–so hot that when your bridle hand dropped inadvertently to the pommel of the saddle, the brass mounting there seemed to burn you. Not a breath of air was stirring, and the sun shone down blazing through the wisps of smoke haze, and the heat waves rose from the dead, parched veldt so that the distant southern volcano looked all quivering.
Then from out the blurred vista in front little by little a clump of comparatively large trees began to take definite shape. Another half mile farther, and we saw that something was moving among the trees as high up as the topmost branches.
“Giraffe,” said Ulyate, and no sooner had he spoken the word than the great, towering animals wheeled and fled from their shelter with that long-legged gallop of theirs which looks so easy and slow, but which carries them over the ground as fast as a speedy horse can run.
The Colonel and the two cowboys set off at a hand gallop in a vain attempt to round them up and drive them back to the cameras. The race was a hopeless one for the horsemen from the start. But, according to the general method of operations adopted by the Colonel from the very beginning, no chance of a capture, however slim it might appear, was to remain untried so long as men and horses could endure.
The two ruts of the wagon road led close by the grove of trees, and when the rest of us reached this spot and dismounted to await results, the three leading horsemen had disappeared long ago into the scrub-grown country to the south.
As noon approached, the heat became more and more oppressive. The cameras had been screwed to the tripods and covered with our coats to protect them from the sun. The horses grazed near by. Mac was sent up one of the trees to warn us of the approach of anything like a giraffe, and the rest of us sat on the ground round the bole in the small circle of thin shade and lazily watched the black ants always crawling and climbing and zigzagging back and forth over the network of fallen twigs and leaves. It was too hot to talk–it was too hot to sleep or think. And by and by the ox-wagons came up, and the oxen brought the flies. For a time then the only sounds were the slow crunching of the feeding horses and an occasional inarticulate snarl from some one or other who foolishly tried to brush the flies away from his face.
Eventually, after a long time had passed, Means rode into the grove of trees, un-heralded by Mac and alone. The bay horse had fallen badly, wrenching his rider’s back where once he had been hurt before. Means took his saddle off, threw it on the ground, and sat on it.
“He dropped into a pig hole,” he explained, “an’ hopped out again as neat as could be. But in hoppin’ out he hopped into another, an’ that just naturally discouraged him an’ he come down with me.”
No comments were made, nor did Means expect any. But evidently he had considered it only justice to the bay that the mishap should receive from him the proper explanation.
Then Loveless returned, also alone. He made a few grumbling remarks about its being all nonsense to run the horses to death when there was no chance at all. But as his listeners showed not the slightest interest in the matter, he, too, relapsed into silence.
The Colonel was the last to come in. He rode straight to the tree where the company were gathered, dismounted, and sat down. Then he spoke to the world at large.
“They must be about here somewhere,” he said. “And being about here somewhere, we’ll get ’em yet.”
When the shadow beneath the tree began to lengthen toward the east, the safari shook itself together and prepared to move on once more. But this time, instead of occupying his customary position at the head of the column, the Colonel lagged behind.
Immediately after leaving the grove of trees, the road commenced to climb the first rises of the Mau escarpment. As we mounted higher up the hillside, the view behind us opened out into a grand panorama of the two valleys and their sentinel volcanoes, with the smoke haze hanging over all. For a time, those of us who were in front rode half sideways in the saddle, looking back over the way we had come and over the district we had grown to know so well. Then we crossed a small, level park that formed the crest of the first hill, and as we moved down the western slope the view behind us disappeared and the new country spread before us.
Kearton was riding with his head sunk on his chest like a sick man. Gobbet asked if anything was wrong with him.
“Nothing bad; too much heat this morning, likely.”
“Want to hunt a bit of shade and lie up awhile? “
“No, I’ll go on.”
Gobbet shrugged his shoulders. “You’re the judge,” he said.
Hill after hill stretched away in front to the one upstanding kopje that marked the top of the Mau. The district was wooded with small, twisted trees, and the fire had crossed here, so that the ground was black and the air smelled stronger of burning.
Presently Means stopped. “I’d better wait till the Colonel comes along,” he explained. “The Colonel don’t carry any weapons.”
Loveless stopped with him, and, as Ulyate was somewhere behind with the ox-wagons and porters, this left Kearton, Gobbet, and myself to ride on by ourselves. For a mile or more the road lifted and dipped with monotonous regularity, and the burnt land was still on either hand, without a sign of life anywhere to be seen. So when the sun really began to decline toward the west, Gobbet, who had once been assistant manager of the Alhambra Music Hall in Brighton, told the story of Harry Lauder and the liquid air biscuits, and it seemed to do Kearton good. Kearton had just told Gobbet to quit his lying, when all three of us realized that for the last half minute we had been unconsciously listening to the beat of a galloping horse on the road behind.
The next instant Ulyate pulled up in a cloud of dust.
“Colonel wants you,” he said. “They’ve rounded up a giraffe.”
We wheeled the horses and started back on the run.
“About–three–miles! Left–of the–road!” Ulyate shouted after us.
There were various reasons that called for haste. How long the ropers could keep the giraffe rounded up was especially uncertain, and then, besides, it was near the end of the day and soon the light would be too far gone for a picture.
We met the line of porters and they scattered right and left. Farther on, the ox-teams crowded one side to give us room. Then we came upon the four special porters with the cameras. Kearton took his machine on the saddle with him, and Gobbet caught up the tripod from another pair of outstretched arms.
When we reached the bit of clearing and looked to the left of the road, we saw the long neck and head of a giraffe sharply outlined against the sky.
The giraffe stood motionless. His feet were spread a little apart as though he was prepared to dash away again at the first opportunity, and he gazed in a curious way first at one, then at another of the three ropers that surrounded him and now sat their horses, waiting. There was still enough light left for a picture, but Kearton was nearly done.
“Give him a minute’s breather,” said the Colonel. ” We’ll hold the critter till he’s ready.”
We took Kearton off his horse and stretched him on the ground and poured the lukewarm water from a canteen on his head. Meanwhile Cobbet screwed the camera to the tripod and set it up.
By the time Gobbet had finished, Kearton was on his feet again. From his position near by, Means ventured the opinion that it was too much excitement that had knocked him over, and Kearton swore back at him pleasantly and went to work.
A high-pitched yell from the Colonel sent the giraffe away across the open with that clumsy-looking, powerful gallop that is all his own, and with his long neck plunging slowly back and forth.
Loveless’s black, one of the fastest horses in the string, had hard work to gain on the giraffe, expecially as the animal swerved quickly at the last moment and fled down the eastern slope of the hill through the scrub where the going was none too good.
It was a difficult throw–and a new one for a Western cowboy–to send the noose so far up into the air over the head perched high on the long, swaying neck.
But at the first attempt Loveless succeeded, and then reined in gently so as not to throw the beast, because a giraffe would fall heavily, and would very likely break his neck or a leg if tumbled over.
Finally he was brought to a standstill, his feet spread apart as before, and for a while the two stood facing each other–the cowboy and the towering giraffe, with the rope from the saddle horn leading up at a considerable angle to the shoulders of the prize. The rest of the hunt soon gathered about them. Although the light was rapidly failing, Kearton finished what was left of his roll of film. The whir of the camera ended with a peculiar flapping sound.
“That’s all,” said Kearton, and sank down on a near-by stone.
But Loveless and the giraffe continued to face each other undisturbed.
“Well?” said Loveless, presently.
“Well?” echoed the Colonel.
“Well, how are we going to take this rope off him? We’ve got none to spare, you know.”
“Get a ladder,” suggested Means.
“No, we won’t need a ladder,” said the Colonel seriously, “but we’ll have to throw him, after all. We can do it gently, I guess, without hurting him.”
Accordingly, Means roped the giraffe by one hind leg and pulled it out from under him, so that he sank easily to the ground and both the ropes were loosened and freed.
The sun had set and the short twilight was rapidly deepening. The ox-wagons and porters were several miles ahead. So we packed up the camera, coiled up the ropes, mounted, and rode away, and the giraffe raised himself on his haunches among the bushes and watched us go.
We camped at a water hole that night, and started on again the next morning in the darkness before the dawn, with a porter ahead carrying a lantern to show the way. With ox-wagons it is a three days’ journey from that water hole to the Guas Nyiro River at the border of the Sotik. The country through which we passed continued to be the same as that of the Mau escarpment–a succession of low hills and shallow valleys covered with the small, twisted trees. And there was plenty of water on the way. But there was no game in the district.
We had been told before starting that we need not expect to see anything on the way, because antelope, zebra, and such like animals avoid the wooded section so as not to be caught unaware by lions, and, since the prey seek the safety of the open plains, the lions are compelled to follow.
In spite of this fact, and although the dense woods and broken ground generally forced the safari to keep to the road, the cowboys were always ready and the cameras, always loaded with film. But the land on either side remained silent and deserted.
And each day’s journey was the same as the one before; the start in the gray of the morning, the long, hot ride, with the road gently rising and falling over the hills, and the sudden cool of the evening when the sun went down. At times the camera department would take moving pictures of the wagons and porters crossing a river, where an especially picturesque bit of scenery offered an attractive setting. Occasionally Means, as he rode along, would commence singing one of the songs of our Western plains, verse after verse, seemingly without end, recounting in detail some local historical event, such as an Indian attack on an army post, a shooting affair at a dance, or a train-robber’s hanging. He would sing more to himself than to anybody else, and if this began to bore him at all, he would stop in the middle and leave the story untold.
Then sometimes, when we outspanned for an hour at noon, the four special camera porters would give imitations of Kearton and Gobbet taking pictures, of Loveless shoeing horses, or of Means in the act of roping. And in the evenings, when the day’s march was done and the outpost fires had been lighted, the talk of the company would turn to our chances of finding luck in the Sotik country that lay ahead.
In the afternoon of March 16 we reached Webb’s Farm, in the Guas Nyiro valley, which lies at the edge of the big plains. In this neighborhood there were three farms–Webb’s, Curry’s, and Agate’s–and on the evening of our arrival some of their men paid a visit to the camp. They had heard of the expedition, and each in turn examined the horses, the dogs, the ropes, and the saddles, and then, like the hunters at Nairobi, asked the inevitable question:
“But how are you going to do it?”
“Oh, we’ll do it somehow,” the Colonel replied good-naturedly. And the visitors shook their heads a little and smiled and changed the subject.
But to attempt to rope a rhinoceros or a lion required fresh horses, and ever since we had left Nairobi, nearly a fortnight ago, we had worked our horses hard every day. Now that we had reached the land of the big game, the Colonel for the first time called a day of rest. So we loafed about camp from sunrise to sunset and by evening were heartily sick of it all.
Perhaps we had expected too much of this Sotik country; perhaps the expedition was running, temporarily, in a streak of bad luck; but the fact remains that when we resumed hunting on March 18, disappointment only followed disappointment.
As we had done in the Rift Valley, so here we adopted the method of sweeping the country with a widely extended line. The first day we rode far to the southward, to the Hot Springs and back, and found nothing, and an unreasoning depression settled upon the expedition. The next day we rode still farther, to the westward this time, and again found nothing, and so the depression deepened. Also on the afternoon of this day it rained heavily, and Curry agreed with Ulyate that this probably meant the beginning of the rainy season, which was already overdue.
That night at the supper table the Colonel spoke his mind. The rain was dripping through the canvas fly overhead, and the Colonel wore his broad-brimmed hat to help keep the water off his plate.
“There’s no use hanging round here any longer,” he said, “not a bit of use. We haven’t seen anything, nor a sign of anything. When the rains begin in earnest, this ground will soften fast an’ the horses will get bogged an’ we’ll have to quit. So from now on we’ve got to work fast. Now Ulyate says there’s water about twelve miles from here to the north–called the Soda Swamp. We’ll start for the Soda Swamp in the morning.”
Again it was moving day. The morning dawned fine after the rain, and the air was clear, and the country looked greener and fresher than it had ever looked before. By the time the sun rose, the first wagon was packed, so the safari set out on the journey, leaving the second wagon to load and follow our tracks, for there was no road to the Soda Swamp.
At the last moment the Colonel decided that he and the cowboys might just as well make a circuit to the westward of the line of march on the off chance of finding game.
“We covered that district pretty thoroughly yesterday,” he said. “But still, you never can tell.”
Yet nobody thought it worth while for the camera department to go with them, and so Kearton and Gobbet and the four special porters trailed along with the slow, plodding wagon. In the first place, the wagons would follow the shortest route and the horses would be none the worse for an easy day; in the second, if by the remotest chance the Colonel flushed anything worth while, he could more easily find the cameras.
Curry had remained behind to bring on the second load, and soon Ulyate left us to make a detour past Agate’s farm to procure another sack of rice that was badly needed. Ours was a large safari, and the details of transportation required close attention.
The morning wore on. The sky remained clear and the heat became intense. The direction in which we were traveling led us along the border of the plains, through small green parks, scattered groves of trees, and scrub.
So far as the mounted men were concerned, the march was a succession of rides and halts. The heavily laden ox-wagon traveled slowly, and it soon became our custom to dismount in a bit of shade and let the wagon pass ahead about a mile, when we would mount again and catch up with it and then repeat the process.
At one of these places there was a grass-grown mound against which we sat, leaning comfortably, and speculated on the distance we had come and the distance we had to go. When, after a while, it became evident that we should never agree in the matter, the conversation altered to a sort of spasmodic affair.
“I thought this district was so full of big game that you couldn’t sleep at night for the lions roaring around you,” Gobbet remarked lazily.
“Wait till you get among them,” said Kearton. “Sais, keep that horse farther away; he’ll be walking on us next.”
“Well, I haven’t been kept awake any yet,” Gobbet replied.
“I wonder where that wagon’s got to,” and Kearton raised himself on one elbow and peered ahead from beneath the down-tilted brim of his helmet. Then he lay back again and shut his eyes.
“Means is coming,” he said.
The announcement occasioned no surprise. Undoubtedly Means had some reason for returning over the trail, and when he reached the mound we should probably learn what he wanted.
Means dismounted and sat down beside us. “We’ve found a rhino over in the next valley yonder,” he remarked, and nodded his head toward the west.
“A rhino is no matter to joke about,” said Gobbet. “Please remember that in future.”
“I’m not jokin’,” said Means. “Colonel’s watchin’ him. Loveless stopped halfway here, about three miles off. Colonel sent me to bring the rest of you and get the heavy rope.”
“Is that right, Means?” Kearton asked sharply.
“Sure.”
“Come on, then.”
In five minutes we had overtaken the wagon and stopped it, and while Means clambered up on to the load to hunt for the heavy rope, Kearton collected the camera porters and started ahead with them in the direction Means pointed out.
But Means could not find the rope he wanted. He threw off half the load without success.
“It’s on the other wagon. There’s where it is,” he finally concluded. “No time to wait now. Other wagon likely hasn’t started yet. We’ll have to do with what we’ve got.”
We rode on at an easy jog to keep the horses fresh, and at the end of half an hour we came upon Loveless waiting for us just beneath the crest of a rise. He had off-saddled his horse and had turned him loose to graze a bit before the coming work, and a few minutes were occupied while Loveless saddled up again and Kearton and Gobbet adjusted their cameras and took them on their horses.
Finally every one was ready, and we set forth once more on a wide detour to the north to approach the beast from down the wind.
Loveless gave us the latest news: “The Colonel came over the rise a half hour ago and said the rhino was laying down resting quiet. The Colonel went back again at once to keep watch.”
As we proceeded farther on the circuit and began to ride down the gentle slope into the adjacent valley, we slowed down the pace to a cautious walk. No one spoke, and on the grass of the veldt the tread of the horses made scarcely any sound.
Suddenly the Colonel appeared, walking toward us, bent low. He had backed out o’ his hiding-place behind a clump of scrub.
“He’s laying down over there about a hundred yards away,” he whispered. “Now we want to catch the start of the show. You boys ready?”
Means tightened his cinch, and shook his rope loose and coiled it up again. Loveless said he was ready. One of the saises produced the Colonel’s horse from behind another clump of scrub, and Kearton dismounted and began creeping forward with his camera.
“Don’t start him up till I get my position,” he cautioned. “I’ll wave my hand.”
On account of the growth of low bushes, we could not see the rhino, but in silence we watched Kearton tiptoeing farther and farther ahead toward the spot where the Colonel had said the beast was lying down. The time was approximately a little after noon. The wind that was blowing was light, and same to us hot over the sunny reaches of veldt. The sky was cloudless.
Then the three ropers commenced maneuvering forward, swinging out a little to the right. Kearton stopped. He set up his camera and sighted it, and took out his handkerchief and carefully wiped the lens.
When Kearton waved his hand, the Colonel’s yell shattered the stillness and the great beast heaved up out of the grass and tossed his head and sniffed the air and snorted. The horsemen rode full tilt at him, and with surprising quickness the rhino wheeled and broke away south down the valley.
For a good three miles the rhino ran straight and fast. Finally he came into more open country, which was dotted here and therewith small thorn trees. Here, also, in one place there was a fair-sized pool of water, left over from the rains of the night before. The rhino selected this pool as a good position from which to act on the defensive. He splashed into the water, stopped, and faced the horsemen.
Then followed a few minutes’ respite for all concerned. The horses were panting heavily after the sharp run, and the rhino’s position in the pool rendered it difficult to approach him for a chance to throw a rope. Evidently considering himself safe for the moment, the beast rolled once or twice in the water and then stood on guard as before, but with his black sides dripping.
“We’ve got to get him out of that,” said the Colonel. “A horse wouldn’t stand a show there. Now when I get him to charge me, you boys stand by.”
Before the Colonel finished speaking, he was already edging toward the pool. For fifteen yards the rhino watched him coming. Then with a great snort he charged out of the water, sending the white spray flying in every direction, and the Colonel had to ride hard to keep ahead of the tossing horn. But Means was after the rhino like a flash, and with a quick throw caught him round the neck. The big bay fell back on his haunches and the rope snapped like twine.
“We’ll miss that heavy rope to-day,” Means said.
“We’ll tie him up with what we’ve got,” the Colonel replied. “Only we’ve got to tire him out some first. What we’ll do is to make him charge us one after the other, so he’ll run three times to the horses’ running once.”
It was a full half hour before the next attempt was made to throw a rope. Time after time the rhino came plunging out of the water to charge the nearest horseman. Our Western horses proved to be only just a trifle faster than the rhino, so that each time the beast nearly caught them. Besides, here and there, the ground was bad with ant-bear holes, which had to be avoided, for a fall would mean disaster. But little by little it became apparent that the rhino’s continual charging was beginning to produce an effect.
In the meanwhile the rest of the chase was coming up. In the distance we could see them hurrying down the valley–horsemen and porters considerably scattered, as if each one followed a route of his own choosing Kearton led on his big chestnut. He was carrying the heavy camera under his arm, the tripod over his shoulder. The reins were hanging loose over his saddle horn, his heels were thumping the horse’s sides, and the perspiration was streaming down his face.
“We lost you,” he panted. “How’s it going? What a picture!”
Mac, the Mohammedan, and Aro, the Masai warrior, took the apparatus from him, and he dismounted and went to work.
At the second attempt to rope the beast, Loveless caught him by one hind leg, and the rhino decided to shift his base of operations to an ant-hill in the neighboring clearing. His mode of progression was to walk on three legs and to drag the black horse after him with the other. He reached the ant-hill and demolished it and paused for a breathing spell.
The chase followed after, and Kearton went into action on the north and Gobbet on the south, near a small thorn tree, with a negro porter beside him. The rhino caught sight of Gobbet’s camera and charged. The porter went up the tree like a flash. Gobbet was bent over, looking through his view-finder, which, of course, gave him no idea of how fast the beast was bearing down on him nor how close he had already come.
“Look out!” yelled the Colonel.
Gobbet glanced up over the top of the camera and made a jump for the tree. But the porter was already in the branches, and the tree was so small there was not room for two, and Gobbet had to run for it. The next second, with a powerful upward stroke of his horn, the rhino sent the apparatus flying. Then Means succeeded in attracting his attention and he charged the horseman instead. Gobbet picked up the debris, found that the tripod-head was split clean in two as with an axe, found the camera itself undamaged, found there was enough head left to support the camera, quickly mounted his machine again, and was just in time to catch the end of the rhino’s chase after Means.
And all the while Kearton had his camera trained upon the scene in which his assistant was playing the conspicuous part.
“I hope I got that good,” he said; “it’ll make fine action–fine.”
From one position to another, from ant-hill to thorn tree and back to ant-hill once more, the fight went on through the long, hot afternoon. Ropes were thrown and caught and broken, mended and thrown again. The horses were pulled, all standing, one way and another. Rolls of film were exposed and replaced by fresh ones. The rhino sulked and stormed and charged in turn.
At the end of the fourth hour Loveless had one short length of light line left. The rest of the ropes were dangling, broken, from the rhino’s legs and neck as he stood at bay over the ruins of the ant-hill.
The sun was rapidly canting toward the west. The continual work in the intense heat, without food or water, was beginning to tell on both horses and men. The rhino was weakening faster. But only one hour of daylight remained, and if the beast could hold out till dark we should lose him.
There was the dead stump of a tree with the roots protruding lying in the grass near by. The Colonel told Means to fasten the stump to the last piece of line, and Loveless rode toward Kearton’s machine, past the rhino, dragging the stump behind him. As the Colonel had foreseen, the beast charged at the stump, and the loose ropes hanging from him became entangled in the roots.
So on they went at a run, first Loveless, then the stump, bounding over the ground, then the charging rhino, headed straight for Kearton’s camera. The Masai warrior stood by the tripod with his long spear poised high, and Kearton turned the handle and shouted at Loveless:
“How many times have I got to tell you not to come straight into the lens? Bring him on at an angle! . . . I don’t want to be unreasonable,” he added, when the rhino stopped, “but you ought to have learned better by this time.”
Then, by hauling in gently, Loveless succeeded in recovering two of the ropes, and they were pieced together and thrown again, catching the rhino by one hind leg. Both the cowboys put their horses to work pulling forward on the rope, and they lifted that one hind leg ahead. The tired beast shifted his great body after it, and thus step by step the horses dragged him up to a tree, where Loveless passed the end of the rope two turns around the bole and made it fast.
The rhino charged once just before the knot was tied, and Loveless had to jump into the branches through the thorns to escape. He charged again, rather feebly this time, trying to get free, but the rope held well and tripped him up. After that he stood quietly at the end of his tether, watching the camera in a sullen way while Kearton took his picture with the last few feet of film.
By this time the light was almost gone, the films were finished, horses and men were nearly done, and, besides, it was moving day and high time we resumed the march.
In the November number Mr. Scull will relate the adventures of the Buffalo Jones African Expedition in Lassoing Lion.
***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII No. 5 NOVEMBER, 1910
The Homely Heroine {pages 602-608}
By EDNA FERBER
MILLIE WHITCOMB, of the fancy goods and notions, beckoned me with her finger. I had been standing at Kate O’Malley’s counter, pretending to admire her new basket-weave suitings; but in reality reveling in her droll account of how, in the train coming up from Chicago, Mrs. Judge Porterfield had worn the negro porter’s coat over her chilly shoulders in mistake for her husband’s. Kate O’Malley can tell a funny story in a way to make the after-dinner pleasantries of a Washington diplomat sound like the clumsy jests told around the village grocery stove.
“I wanted to tell you that I read that last story of yours,” said Millie, sociably, when I had strolled over to her counter, “and I liked it, all but the heroine. She had an `adorable throat’ and hair that `waved away from her white brow,’ and eyes that `now were blue and now gray.’ Say, why don’t you write a story about an ugly girl?”
“My land!” protested I. “It’s bad enough trying to make them accept my stories as it is. That last heroine was a raving beauty, but she came back eleven times before the editor of Blakely’s succumbed to her charms.”
Millie’s fingers were busy straightening the contents of a tray of combs and imitation jet barrettes. Millie’s fingers were not intended for that task. They are slender, tapering fingers, pink-tipped and sensitive.
“I should think,” mused she, rubbing a cloudy piece of jet with a bit of soft cloth, “that they’d welcome a homely one with relief. These goddesses are so cloying.”
Millie Whitcomb’s black hair is touched with soft mists of gray, and she wears lavender shirtwaists and white stocks edged with lavender. There is a Colonial air about her that has nothing to do with celluloid combs and imitation jet barrettes. It breathes of dim old rooms, rich with the tones of mahogany and old brass, and Millie in the midst of it, gray-gowned, a soft white fichu crossed upon her breast.
In our town the clerks are not the pert and gum-chewing young persons that story-writers are wont to describe. The girls at Bascom’s are institutions. They know us all by our first names, and our lives are as an open book to them. Kate O’Malley, who has been at Bascom’s for so many years that she is rumored to have stock in the company, may be said to govern the fashions of our town. She is wont to say, when we express a fancy for gray as the color of our new spring suit:
“Oh, now, Nellie, don’t get gray again. You had it year before last, and don’t you think it was just the least leetle bit trying? Let me show you that green that came in yesterday. I said the minute I clapped my eyes on it that it was just the color for you, with your brown hair and all.”
And we end by deciding on the green.
The girls at Bascom’s are not gossips–they are too busy for that–but they may be said to be delightfully well informed. How could they be otherwise when we go to Bascom’s for our wedding dresses and party favors and baby flannels? There is news at Bascom’s that out daily paper never hears of, and wouldn’t dare to print if it did.
So when Millie Whitcomb, of the fancy goods and notions, expressed her hunger for a homely heroine, I did not resent the suggestion. On the contrary, it sent me home in thoughtful mood, for Millie Whitcomb has acquired a knowledge of human nature in the dispensing of her fancy goods and notions. It set me casting about for a really homely heroine.
There never has been a really ugly heroine in fiction. Authors have started bravely out to write of an unlovely woman, but they never have had the courage to allow her to remain plain. On Page 237 she puts on a black lace dress and red roses, and the combination brings out unexpected tawny lights in her hair, and olive tints in her cheeks, and there she is, the same old beautiful heroine. Even in the “Duchess ” books one finds the simple Irish girl, on donning a green corduroy gown cut square at the neck, transformed into a wild-rose beauty, at sight of whom a ball-room is hushed into admiring awe. There’s the case of Jane Eyre, too. She is constantly described as plain and mouse-like, but there are covert hints as to her gray eyes and slender figure and clear skin, and we have a sneaking notion that she wasn’t such a fright after all. Therefore, when I tell you that I am choosing Pearlie Schultz as my leading lady you are to understand that she is ugly, not only when the story opens, but to the bitter end. In the first place, Pearlie is fat. Not plump, or rounded, or dimpled, or deliciously curved, but FAT. She bulges in all the wrong places, including her chin. (Sister, who has a way of snooping over my desk in my absence, says that I may as well drop this now, because nobody would ever read it, anyway, least of all any sane editor. I protest when I discover that Sis has been over my papers. It bothers me. But she says you have to do these things when you have a genius in the house, and cites the case of Kipling’s “Recessional,” which was rescued from the depths of his wastebasket by his wife.)
Pearlie Schultz used to sit on the front porch summer evenings and watch the couples stroll by, and weep in her heart. A fat girl with a fat girl’s soul is a comedy. But a fat girl with a thin girl’s soul is a tragedy. Pearlie, in spite of her two hundred pounds, had the soul of a willow wand.
The walk in front of Pearlie’s house was guarded by a row of big trees that cast kindly shadows. The strolling couples used to step gratefully into the embrace of these shadows, and from them into other embraces. Pearlie, sitting on the porch, could see them dimly, although they could not see her. She could not help remarking that these strolling couples were strangely lacking in sprightly conversation. Their remarks were but fragmentary, disjointed affairs, spoken in low tones with a queer, tremulous note in them. When they reached the deepest, blackest, kindliest shadow, which fell just before the end of the row of trees, the strolling couples almost always stopped, and then there came a quick movement, and a little smothered cry from the girl, and then a sound, and then a silence. Pearlie, sitting alone on the porch in the dark, listened to these things and blushed furiously. Pearlie had never strolled into the kindly shadows with a little beating of the heart, and she had never been surprised with a quick arm about her and eager lips pressed warmly against her own.
In the daytime Pearlie worked as public stenographer at the Burke Hotel. She rose at seven in the morning, and rolled for fifteen minutes, and lay on her back and elevated her heels in the air, and stood stiff kneed while she touched the floor with her finger tips one hundred times, and went without her breakfast. At the end of each month she usually found that she weighed three pounds more than she had the month before.
The folks at home never joked with Pearlie about her weight. Even one’s family has some respect for a life sorrow. Whenever Pearlie asked that inevitable question of the fat woman: “Am I as fat as she is?” her mother always answered: “You! Well, I should hope not! You’re looking real peaked lately, Pearlie. And your blue skirt just ripples in the back, it’s getting so big for you.”
Of such blessed stuff are mothers made.
But if the gods had denied Pearlie all charms of face or form, they had been decent enough to bestow on her one gift. Pearlie could cook like an angel; no, better than an angel, for no angel could be a really clever cook and wear those flowing kimono-like sleeves. They’d get into the soup. Pearlie could take a piece of rump and some suet and an onion and a cup or so of water, and evolve a pot roast that you could cut with a fork. She could turn out a surprisingly good cake with surprisingly few eggs, all covered with white icing, and bearing cunning little jelly figures on its snowy bosom. She could beat up biscuits that fell apart at the lightest pressure, revealing little pools of golden butter within. Oh, Pearlie could cook!
On week days Pearlie rattled the typewriter keys, but on Sundays she shooed her mother out of the kitchen. Her mother went, protesting faintly: “Now, Pearlie, don’t fuss so for dinner. You ought to get your rest on Sunday instead of stewing over a hot stove all morning.”
“Hot fiddlesticks, ma,” Pearlie would say, cheerily. “It ain’t hot, because it’s a gas stove. And I’ll only get fat if I sit around. You put on your black-and-white and go to church. Call me when you’ve got as far as your corsets, and I’ll puff your hair for you in the back.” In her capacity of public stenographer at the Burke Hotel, it was Pearlie’s duty to take letters dictated by traveling men and beginning: “Yours of the 10th at hand. In reply would say . . .” or: “Enclosed please find, etc.” As clinching proof of her plainness it may be stated that none of the traveling men, not even Max Baum, who was so fresh that the girl at the cigar counter actually had to squelch him, ever called Pearlie “baby doll,” or tried to make a date with her. Not that Pearlie would ever have allowed them to. But she never had had to reprove them. During pauses in dictation she had a way of peering near-sightedly over her glasses at the dapper, well-dressed traveling salesman who was rolling off the items on his sale bill. That is a trick which would make the prettiest kind of a girl look owlish.
On the night that Sam Miller strolled up to talk to her, Pearlie was working late. She had promised to get out a long and intricate bill for Max Baum, who travels for Kuhn and Klingman, so that he might take the nine o’clock evening train. The irrepressible Max had departed with much eclat and clatter, and Pearlie was preparing to go home when Sam approached her.
Sam had just come in from the Gayety Theatre across the street, whither he had gone in a vain search for amusement after supper. He had come away in disgust. A soiled soubrette with orange-colored hair and baby socks had swept her practiced eye over the audience, and, attracted by Sam’s good-looking blond head in the second row, had selected him as the target of her song. She had run up to the extreme edge of the footlights at the risk of teetering over, and had informed Sam through the medium of song–to the huge delight of the audience, and to Sam’s red-faced discomfiture–that she liked his smile, and he was just her style, and just as cute as he could be, and just the boy for her. On reaching the chorus she had whipped out a small, round mirror and, assisted by the calcium-light man in the rear, had thrown a wretched little spotlight on Sam’s head.
Ordinarily, Sam would not have minded it. But that evening, in the vest pocket just over the place where he supposed his heart to be, reposed his girl’s daily letter. They were to be married on Sam’s return to New York from his first long trip. In the letter near his heart she had written prettily and seriously about traveling men, and traveling men’s wives, and her little code for both. The fragrant, girlish, grave little letter had caused Sam to sour on the efforts of the soiled soubrette.
As soon as possible he had fled up the aisle and across the street to the hotel writing-room. There he had spied Pearlie’s good-humored, homely face, and its contrast with the silly, red-and-white countenance of the unlaundered soubrette had attracted his homesick heart.
Pearlie had taken some letters from him earlier in the day. Now, in his hunger for companionship, he strolled up to her desk just as she was putting her typewriter to bed.
“Gee! This is a lonesome town!” said Sam, smiling down at her.
Pearlie glanced up at him, over her glasses. “I guess you must be from New York,” she said. “I’ve heard a real New Yorker can get bored in Paris. In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer, than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world. Ain’t they?”
“Oh, now,” protested Sam, “quit kiddin’ me! You’d be lonesome for the little old town, too, if you’d been born and dragged up in it, and hadn’t seen it for four months.”
“New to the road, aren’t you?” asked Pearlie.
Sam blushed a little. “How did you know?”
“Well, you generally can tell. They don’t know what to do with themselves evenings, and they look rebellious when they go into the dining-room. The old-timers just look resigned.”
“You’ve picked up a thing or two around here, haven’t you? I wonder if the time will ever come when I’ll look resigned to a hotel dinner, after four months of ’em. Why, girl, I’ve got so I just eat the things that are covered up–like baked potatoes in the shell, and soft boiled eggs, and baked apples, and oranges that I can peel, and nuts.”
“Why, you poor kid,” breathed Pearlie, her pale eyes fixed on him in motherly pity. “You oughtn’t to do that. You’ll get so thin your girl won’t know you.”
Sam looked up, quickly. “How in thunderation did you know—-?”
Pearlie was pinning on her hat, and she spoke succinctly, her hatpins between her teeth: “You’ve been here two days now, and I notice you dictate all your letters except the longest one, and you write that one off in a corner of the writing-room all by yourself, with your cigar just glowing like a live coal, and you squint up through the smoke, and grin to yourself.”
“Say, would you mind if I walked home with you?” asked Sam.
If Pearlie was surprised, she was woman enough not to show it. She picked up her gloves and handbag, locked her drawer with a click, and smiled her acquiescence. And when Pearlie smiled she was awful. It was a glorious evening in the early summer, moonless, velvety, and warm. As they strolled homeward, Sam told her all about the Girl, as is the way of traveling men the world over. He told her about the tiny apartment they had taken, and how he would be on the road only a couple of years more, as this was just a try-out that the firm always insisted on. And they stopped under an arc light while Sam showed her the picture in his watch as is also the way of traveling men since time immemorial.
Pearlie made an excellent listener. He was so boyish and so much in love and so pathetically eager to make good with the firm, and so happy to have someone in whom to confide.
“But it’s a dog’s life, after all,” reflected Sam, again after the fashion of all traveling men. “Any fellow on the road earns his salary these days, you bet. I used to think it was all getting up when you felt like it, and sitting in the big front window of the hotel, smoking a cigar and watching the pretty girls go by. I wasn’t wise to the packing, and the unpacking, and the rotten train service, and the grouchy customers, and the canceled bills, and the grub.”
Pearlie nodded understandingly. “A man told me once that twice a week regularly he dreamed of the way his wife cooked noodle-soup.”
“My folks are German,” explained Sam. “And my mother–can she cook! Well, I just don’t seem able to get her potato pancakes out of my mind. And her roast beef tasted and looked like roast beef, and not like a wet red flannel rag.”
At this moment Pearlie was seized with a brilliant idea. “To-morrow’s Sunday. You’re going to Sunday here, aren’t you? Come over and eat your dinner with us. If you have forgotten the taste of real food, I can give you a dinner that’ll jog your memory.”
“Oh, really,” protested Sam. “You’re awfully good, but I couldn’t think of it. I—-“
“You needn’t be afraid. I’m not letting you in for anything. I may be homelier than an English suffragette, and I know my lines are all bumps, but there’s one thing you can’t take away from me, and that’s my cooking hand. I can cook, boy, in a way to make your mother’s Sunday dinner, with company expected look like Mrs. Newly-wed’s first attempt at `riz’ biscuits. And I don’t mean any disrespect to your mother when I say it. I’m going to have noodle-soup, and fried chicken, and hot biscuits, and creamed beans from our own garden, and strawberry shortcake with real—-“
“Hush!” shouted Sam. “If I ain’t there, you’ll know that I passed away during the night, and you can telephone the clerk to break in my door.”
The Grim Reaper spared him, and Sam came, and was introduced to the family, and ate. He put himself in a class with Dr. Johnson, and Ben Brust, and Gargantua, only that his table manners were better. He almost forgot to talk during the soup, and he came back three times for chicken, and by the time the strawberry shortcake was half consumed he was looking at Pearlie with a sort of awe in his eyes.
That night he came over to say good-by before taking his train out for Ishpeming. He and Pearlie strolled down as far as the park and back again.
“I didn’t eat any supper,” said Sam. “It would have been sacrilege, after that dinner of yours. Honestly, I don’t know how to thank you, being so good to a stranger like me. When I come back next trip, I expect to have the Kid with me, and I want her to meet you, by George! She’s a winner and a pippin, but she wouldn’t know whether a porterhouse was stewed or frapped. I’ll tell her about you, you bet. In the meantime, if there’s anything I can do for you, I’m yours to command.”
Pearlie turned to him, suddenly. “You see that clump of thick shadows ahead of us, where those big trees stand in front of our house?”
“Sure,” replied Sam.
“Well, when we step into that deepest, blackest shadow, right in front of our porch, I want you to reach up, and put your arm around me and kiss me on the mouth, just once. And when you get back to New York you can tell your girl I asked you to.”
There broke from him a little involuntary exclamation. It might have been of pity, and it might have been of surprise. It had in it something of both, but nothing of mirth. And as they stepped into the depths of the soft black shadows he took off his smart straw sailor, which was so different from the sailors that the boys in our town wear. And there was in the gesture something of reverence.
Millie Whitcomb didn’t like the story of the homely heroine, after all. She says that a steady diet of such literary fare would give her blue indigestion. Also she objects on the ground that no one got married–that is, the heroine didn’t. And she says that a heroine who does not get married isn’t a heroine at all. She thinks she prefers the pink-cheeked, goddess kind, in the end.
—-
IN A MISSION GARDEN
(Santa Barbara)
By CLARENCE URMY
Stand here, and watch the wondrous birth of Dreams From out the Gate of Silence. Time and Tide, With fingers on their lips, forever bide In large-eyed wonderment, where Thoughts and Themes Of days long flown pass down the slumbrous streams To ports of Poet-land and Song-land. Side By side the many-colored Visions glide, And leave a wake where Fancy glows and gleams.
And then the bells! One stands with low-bowed head While list’ning to their silver tongues recite The sweet tale of the Angelus–there slips A white dove low across the tiling red– And as we breathe a whispered, fond “Good night,” A “Pax vobiscum” parts the Padre’s lips.
***************************************************************** XXIII No. 5 NOVEMBER, 1910
Lassoing WILD ANIMALS In Africa {pages 609-621}
By GUY H. SCULL
FIELD OF THE BUFFALO JONES AFRICAN EXPEDITION.
III
There was no use trying to avoid the fact any longer. The lions, for the present, had left the Sotik country, and by remaining in camp at the Soda Swamp the Buffalo Jones Expedition was only wasting time. And time was precious then–was growing more precious every day–if we expected to finish the work before the rains.
The lion was the only big game we wanted now to complete the list of wild animals roped and tied, and the lion was the most important of all. The expedition had traveled the long journey to the Sotik country especially to find them. Yet ever since the capture of the rhinoceros on the moving day of March 20th we had thoroughly swept the land in the vicinity of the Soda Swamp without finding even a single spoor.
—-
The blurred effect of the unique illustrations to this article is accounted for by the extreme difficulty of reproducing from a cinematograph film.
It simply meant that the lions were not there. Some explanations were offered, some arguments arose as to the whys and wherefores of this state of affairs. A few maintained that the lions had always been found there before; it was strange they should have gone. A theory was advanced that the rains were late and the country was unusually dry, so that the game had shifted to better pastures. Perhaps some water hole they depended on had failed. There is generally some discussion on such occasions. We had counted so much on the Sotik to give us our chance that the truth was hard to realize at first. But no matter what the cause might be, we were finally forced to acknowledge the undeniable fact–the lions had left the district.
On the evening of March 25 the expedition faced the situation. As usual, the night fell cold, and when supper was finished the company collected about the fire that was burning close to the horses. A light wind stirred in the leaves overhead and the sky was full of stars. Here and there a tired horse was already half asleep, and his head nodded gently in the firelight. From the darkness came the low talk of the saises, rolled in their blankets on the ground at the end of the picket line.
Most of the men stood with their backs to the flames, gazing vacantly at the horses, the trees, or the stars. For a while not a word was said. Means threw another log on the fire and then squatted on his heels and silently watched the flames catch the bark and flare up brightly. As the heat increased, Kearton took a step farther away and stood again. Every one knew that the Sotik had failed us and that it was time for us to go, and so eventually when the Colonel spoke he only voiced the general conclusion.
“We’ve got to go back,” he said, speaking straight in front of him at the nearest of the sleepy horses. “We’ve got to go to-morrow and have a try from the water hole at the Rugged Rocks where we saw the two lions on the way out here. We may find one there and we may not. If we don’t, we’ve got to go on to Nairobi and start all over again–provided the rains don’t begin.”
Accordingly, through the long hot days the safari plodded back over the way we had come from the Soda Swamp to Agate’s, from Agate’s to the Honeybird River, and then on once more to the Last Water. The cameras were stowed away on the wagons, the ropes remained coiled on the saddles, for there was no probability of our finding lions on the way. And each man rode as his judgment decreed, because the business of the safari then was to get on over the road, and the ox-wagons behind came along as best they could.
For the most part it was a silent journey. The expedition had turned its back on the district that only a short week ago had held out such alluring promises, and any day now the rains might commence effectually to put a stop to the work before it was done. Then, too–although this may seem to be a small matter, still it had weight with all of us–the white hunters of the country had ridiculed the idea of our being able to rope a lion, and the prospect of returning and admitting defeat without having been given a proper chance was not pleasant to contemplate.
At the Last Water we outspanned for the night and most of the succeeding day. In view of the situation, the long halt was absolutely necessary to give the oxen a good rest and drink before setting forth on the twenty-four-hour journey without water to the Rugged Rocks. But throughout the dragging hours of the enforced rest always there loomed ahead of us the possibility of failure and the need of haste. No mention was made of this openly. The only sign of our underlying anxiety was a vague restlessness pervading the entire safari.
Once on the march again, with the sun low in the west, the restlessness disappeared. The night came dark, because the moon rose late, and the air was still, so that the dust that lifted from beneath the feet of the oxen drifted along with the wagon. Now and again one of the wheels bumped over a rock in the road and the brake beam shook and rattled. At times the high-pitched cries of the native drivers pierced the stillness. Ahead of us the bulk of the wagon load loomed big against the stars.
When the dying moon first showed red through the branches of the twisted trees, the safari crossed the top of the Mau and commenced the slow descent to the valley, and the wagons in front became lost in the darkness and the dust. When the morning star rose, we had come to the foothills of the escarpment, and the dawn wind sprang up cold, so that the men shivered a little in their saddles and buttoned up their coats and began to talk.
“It was just about here that we caught the giraffe that day,” said Kearton. “Remember? And wasn’t it hot?”
The talk drifted aimlessly, round and about from the western ranches to Flicker Alley and the London Music Halls, only to return in the end, as it naturally would, to the water hole at Rugged Rocks and our chances of finding lion. The discussion was lengthy on this point–it always was.
By the time the sun came, the expedition had entered the plain of the Rift Valley, and with the rising of the sun the thirst began. Toward noon we halted for a couple of hours to allow the worst of the heat to pass over, gave the horses and the porters a little of the water that was carried on one of the wagons, and then inspanned again and went on. As the horsemen took the road the Colonel outlined his plan.
“We’ll give the horses a good rest to-night, for we ought to make camp early, and then start hunting the first thing in the morning. We’ve got enough horse-feed to last us three or four days if the water holds out that long. In that time we ought to get a lion if there’s any there. I’ll ride on now a bit and look for signs.”
The Colonel’s horse was a faster walker than the others and slowly he forged ahead. Little by little the safari began to string out along the road until wide spaces grew between the ox-wagons, with the porters straggling after them a mile behind. A change had come over the valley since we had seen it last. The land was whiter beneath the blazing sunshine and the dust lay thicker in the road. Somehow it seemed deserted. The only movement was the shimmer of the heat waves.
The camera department had the slowest mounts, and as the march had become a plodding procession, in which the horses were allowed to choose their own paces, one by one the other members of the expedition passed us.
Loveless came from behind and rode with us for half a mile or so.
“I’ve been thinking this thing over,” he finally said, “and my idea is that after the dogs get the lion stopped, one of us can go by him, rope him, and keep on going, and then the other fellow can catch him by the hind legs and we’ve got him. If you keep on going fast enough, I don’t think he’ll have a chance to spring at you.”
In the pause that followed the delivery of this opinion on a matter that had been thrashed out a hundred times before, his horse gradually carried him farther ahead until he had gone beyond the range of talk.
Ulyate, the white hunter, was the next. Kearton had just finished filling his pipe and he silently reached out the bag of tobacco. But Ulyate shook his head.
“Throat’s too dry,” he said. “But I want to be sure I understand what I’ve got to do. I’m to stand by to protect the cameras and leave the Colonel and the two boys to look after themselves. If the lion charges them I’m not to fire–only if he comes at the cameras.”
“That’s right–only if he comes at the cameras.”
“That’s what I thought, but I wanted to make sure–It’s a likely place, this Rugged Rocks,” he continued over his shoulder. “We might easily find one to-morrow.”
Means on his big bay borrowed a drink of water from Gobbet’s canteen, and rode on after the others.
The march of the safari grew slower and slower. The road was flat, bending a little back and forth in long, sweeping curves, like a rope that was once taut and had been loosened. The native drivers no longer cried at the oxen, for the beasts knew by instinct that they were traveling to water and could be relied upon to do their best; and the men rode with their heads hung down, watching the shadows of the horses on the road and hoping to see them lengthen.
The Colonel, the two cowboys, and Ulyate reached the Rugged Rocks at least an hour ahead, and when the rest of us came straggling in we found them seated on the ground with their backs to the bole of a tree. None of them looked up as we halted there, dismounted, and turned the horses loose. Then Ulyate spoke.
“Water hole has dried,” he said.
There was nothing to be done about it. If the water hole had dried, it had dried. That was all. And we had to push on to Kijabe. Lions or no lions, there was no appeal from that decree. So we sat down with the others and watched the progress of the far-off dust cloud that marked the approaching wagons. Then, when darkness came again, the safari resumed the march.
But the Colonel refused to abandon his former plan entirely without making at least one more attempt. Together with the two cowboys and Kearton, he remained behind to scout at dawn the district between the Rugged Rocks and the railway.
“We might be able to tell if it’s worth while to come back here,” he explained.
It was nearly noon of the following day before the scouting party rejoined the expedition on the platform of the Kijabe station. The party reported that near the base of Longernot, the northern volcano, a belt of lava rock rises perpendicularly from the plain. Close to the southern end of this belt they had flushed two lions, a male and a female, and had kept sight of them for fully an hour. It was the opinion of all in the party that the lions lived in the neighborhood, probably in the rocks.
“Very likely,” said Ulyate; “no one has ever hunted that corner of the valley. There is no water there.”
At first the Colonel was anxious to start back for them at once, hauling the water with us; but after a moment’s reflection he was compelled to concede that it was time to call a halt. Means had strained his back again and could no longer sit straight in the saddle. An old thorn wound in Loveless’s foot needed attention. Horses, dogs, and oxen were entirely fagged out. And besides, the camera department demanded time to develop the earlier pictures, already too long kept in the rolls.
Of course, as the Colonel maintained, the rains might come and the chance be lost. Also the lions might not live in the rocks, as we thought, and to-morrow they might be gone.
“Better grab the opportunity while we have it, he said.
“Look at the horses,” said Means.
The Colonel walked deliberately along the platform to where the horses were tethered among the trees, and stood there watching them for quite a while.
“You’re right, Means,” he said, when he returned to us. “They’ll need at least four or five days before we can put them at a lion–well, we’ve got to chance it.”
The next five days were the longest in the history of the expedition. The Colonel, Means, and Ulyate remained at Kijabe with the outfit. The rest of us traveled down the line to Nairobi to procure more porters, more horse-feed, and more supplies; and every day we watched the weather closely and speculated on the probabilities of how long the lions would see fit to remain in the district. The time was so short that all other plans had been abandoned to take advantage of this one opportunity–the expedition was plunging, so to speak, on this final chance to succeed. But the weather held clear, and in the meanwhile the preparations for this last attempt were pushed with the utmost speed.
The hunters at Nairobi, together with the storekeepers and farmers of the vicinity, had heard of the capture of the rhino. On occasions some of them spoke of it to us. They explained that they had thought all along that we could undoubtedly rope a rhino.
“But you haven’t got a lion yet, have you?” they said.
On April 5 the preparations were nearly completed and Loveless’s foot was nearly well. So we started up the line to rejoin the outfit, leaving Gobbet at Nairobi to finish developing the films. We could not afford to spend more time in preparation. At Kijabe we found the horses thoroughly rested and Means’s back much improved. He had refused to see a doctor, asserting that his back would just naturally get better of its own accord. He said he was ready to start.
With one exception the dogs were in good condition–old John from Arizona with his scars of many battles, Rastus and The Rake, taken from a pack of English fox-hounds, and Simba, the terrier, and the collie clipped like a lion, from the London pound. Sounder, the American bloodhound, still showed some effects of distemper. But none of the dogs was to be left behind on this journey.
That night the ox-wagons were loaded–one with provisions and camp baggage, the other with drums of water–and when the dawn first began to break over the top of the range the expedition set forth from the station. The crater on Longernot had already caught the first rays of the sun when we reached the bottom of the hill and started across the flat land of the valley.
There was no road leading to where we were going, nor track, nor path, of any kind. No safari had ever gone there before. From the height of Kijabe station we had seen what looked to be a long, low mound in the distant veldt. The southern end of that long, low mound was our destination.
The horsemen, as usual, spread out in a widely extended line and passed in front of the wagons and porters. As we penetrated farther into the valley the nature of the country altered. Open parks and stretches of scrub succeeded one another, with here and there a dry donga cutting deep into the ground. As we approached the mound it rapidly grew in height and the black rocks commenced to appear beneath the covering of verdure.
Among the settlers of the district this mound is called the Black Reef. It is the general opinion that the Black Reef is formed of lava that long ago flowed down into the plain from the crater of Longernot. The sides, which rise almost perpendicularly to a height of some two hundred feet, are composed of jagged blocks of stone, honeycombed with deep caves and caverns. The top is covered with thick scrub and creepers and tall, rank grasses. To the southward it ends abruptly, as though the lava flow had suddenly stopped and cooled.
Under the shadow of the Black Reef the hunting party was divided into three parts. The day was too far advanced for any real hunting to be done, but as long as the light lasted the Colonel wanted to make a personal survey of the ground in the immediate vicinity of the rocks. Accordingly he rode to the northern end of the reef, sending the two cowboys to the plains to the south, while the rest remained where we had halted, behind the southern shoulder, to wait for the arrival of the wagons and make camp. But the only incident of the afternoon was a thunder cloud that rose up out of the north and hung there, and then gradually disappeared as the twilight advanced. The others were late in coming in. The Colonel in the north had found tracks–innumerable tracks of different kinds of beasts–all excepting those of the lion. In the south the two cowboys had found a large mixed herd of game; and Loveless had dismounted to shoot for meat, when out of the herd a rhino charged him and he had to kill it to save himself.
“Well, so long as he’s dead we’ll let him lie where he is,” said the Colonel. “Lions are mighty fond of rhino meat. They’ll travel miles to get it. Day after to-morrow, say just at dawn, we ought to be able to pick up a fresh trail there. If we don’t, it will mean that the lions are no longer here, that’s all.”
Loveless grunted some unintelligible comment.
“Might as well be cheerful,” said Means. “We’re not beat yet.”
The first real hunting day commenced at daylight the next morning. Hour after hour the horsemen traveled the plains, back and forth, and across and around, and carefully searched the base of the Black Reef on every side. Only one spot was left untouched. The Colonel decreed that no one should approach where the dead rhino lay, lest our presence there should arouse suspicion too soon. The rhino was a sort of special chance that was to be saved for the proper time.
The day was unusually still and cloudless. Here and there throughout the plains scattered herds of zebra, hartebeests, and gazelles grazed in peace. Not a spoor or a sign of lion was to be seen. For us the day was a blank, and toward evening the thunder cloud rose again out of the north and again melted away into the twilight.
The camp behind the shoulder of the Black Reef was a dry camp. Every drop of water had to be hauled in drums from Sewell’s Farm. The ox-wagon went in the morning and returned in the afternoon. In this way we could haul just enough water to last the outfit twenty-four hours. Special rules were inaugurated. Horses and dogs were given the preference always, and one of the escaries was detailed to guard the drums.
That night the wagon was long in returning from Sewell’s. When it finally arrived, the water in one of the drums had a strange taste.
“It’s bad,” said Loveless.
Immediately the affair assumed grave proportions. That particular drum became the most important object in camp. A feeling akin to personal animosity sprang up against it. For a time the merits and demerits of the case were seriously discussed, and some of the porters gathered there and stared stupidly at the wagon load of water.
“I’ll tell you what it is,” said Ulyate; “it’s the weeds they’ve used as a stopper.”
The weeds in question were inspected closely and various judgments passed, and some of the men were reminded of other times in other lands when the water had turned bad on their hands.