harge had proved too much for
Mahina, and both he and the carbine were by this time well on their way
up a tree. In the circumstances there was nothing to do but follow
suit, which I did without loss of time: and but for the fact that one
of my shots had broken a hind leg, the brute would most certainly have
had me. Even as it was, I had barely time to swing myself up out of his
reach before he arrived at the foot of the tree.

When the lion found he was too late, he started to limp back to the
thicket; but by this time I had seized the carbine from Mahina, and the
first shot I fired from it seemed to give him his quietus, for he fell
over and lay motionless. Rather foolishly, I at once scrambled down
from the tree and walked up towards him. To my surprise and no little
alarm he jumped up and attempted another charge. This time, however, a
Martini bullet in the chest and another in the head finished him for
good and all; he dropped in his tracks not five yards away from me, and
died gamely, biting savagely at a branch which had fallen to the ground.

By this time all the workmen in camp, attracted by the sound of the
firing, had arrived on the scene, and so great was their resentment
against the brute who had killed such numbers of their comrades that it
was only with the greatest difficulty that I could restrain them from
tearing the dead body to pieces. Eventually, amid the wild rejoicings
of the natives and coolies, I had the lion carried to my boma, which
was close at hand. On examination we found no less than six bullet
holes in the body, and embedded only a little way in the flesh of the
back was the slug which I had fired into him from the scaffolding about
ten days previously. He measured nine feet six inches from tip of nose
to tip of tail, and stood three feet eleven and a half inches high;
but, as in the case of his companion, the skin was disfigured by being
deeply scored all over by the boma thorns.

The news of the death of the second "devil" soon spread far and wide
over the country, and natives actually travelled from up and down the
line to have a look at my trophies and at the "devil-killer", as they
called me. Best of all, the coolies who had absconded came flocking
back to Tsavo, and much to my relief work was resumed and we were never
again troubled by man-eaters. It was amusing, indeed, to notice the
change which took place in the attitude of the workmen towards me after
I had killed the two lion