araoh. The flash of the rifle, however,
threw the whole scene into strong relief, and a wild sight it was I can
tell you--with the seething mass of oxen twisted all round the cart, in
such a fashion that their heads looked as though they were growing out
of their rumps; and their horns seemed to protrude from their backs; the
smoking fire with just a blaze in the heart of the smoke; Jim-Jim in the
foreground, where the oxen had thrown him in their wild rush, stretched
out there in terror, and then as a centre to the picture the great gaunt
lioness glaring round with hungry yellow eyes, roaring and whining as
she made up her mind what to do.

"It did not take her long, however, just the time that it takes a flash
to die into darkness, for, before I could fire again or do anything,
with a most fiendish snort she sprang upon poor Jim-Jim.

"I heard the unfortunate lad shriek, and then almost instantly I saw his
legs thrown into the air. The lioness had seized him by the neck, and
with a sudden jerk thrown his body over her back so that his legs hung
down upon the further side.[*] Then, without the slightest hesitation,
and apparently without any difficulty, she cleared the skerm face at
a single bound, and bearing poor Jim-Jim with her vanished into the
darkness beyond, in the direction of the bathing-place that I have
already described. We jumped up perfectly mad with horror and fear, and
rushed wildly after her, firing shots at haphazard on the chance that
she would be frightened by them into dropping her prey, but nothing
could we see, and nothing could we hear. The lioness had vanished into
the darkness, taking Jim-Jim with her, and to attempt to follow her till
daylight was madness. We should only expose ourselves to the risk of a
like fate.

[*] I have known a lion carry a two-year-old ox over a stone
wall four feet high in this fashion, and a mile away into
the bush beyond. He was subsequently poisoned by strychnine
put into the carcass of the ox, and I still have his claws.
--Editor.

"So with scared and heavy hearts we crept back to the skerm, and sat
down to wait for the dawn, which now could not be much more than an hour
off. It was absolutely useless to try even to disentangle the oxen till
then, so all that was left for us to do was to sit and wonder how it
came to pass that the one should be taken and the other left, and to
hope against hope that our poor servant might have been m