e, as each point lovingly sought to
retain him, to a fork near the bottom, where he stayed.

At last he picked himself out of the fork, and--oh my!--with a whistling
grunt of rage, coolly, calmly, clumsily if you like, but grandly all the
same, trotted forth into the open to look for that bull-gnu again. And
that, sirs, was the sort, of animal _he_ was.

The bull-gnu, however, who was not previously acquainted with small
beasts that would face his charge--and an aerial journey, _and_ the
thorns--and come back for more, had fetched a curve at full gallop, and
loped off into the landscape. For the first time since the herds
outlawed him, I fancy, he seemed to be quite pleased with himself, and
soon, antelope-like, put the ratel from him placidly, and forgot. But he
was reckoning without his host. If he had done with the ratel, the ratel
had not done with him. No, by thunder--not by a good bit!

Finding no bull-gnu, the slow little black and grayish-white fighter from
Fightersville returned at a walk, still whistling with rage, to the
unearthed bees'-nest, which looked like a town after a bad air-raid. And
the first thing he did was to patter almost on top of a cobra, a
five-footer, who, having narrowly escaped death by the gnu's flying
hoofs, was what one might call considerably "het" up, or "off the
handle," so to say.

The servant of the Devil sat up, blew out its beastly hood, and shot
forth a hiss that seemed to run all up and down one's spine, like
lightning on an elm-tree.

The robber of honey sat up, said "Tchik!" and turned a somersault.
What's that? Yes, somersault is right.

Followed instantly two thin jets of liquid, as much as anything I can
think of like those lines called "trajectory curves" which ballisticians
do so love to draw in books on rifle-shooting; only, these curved lines
began at the hollow point of Mr. Cobra's poison-fangs, and were meant to
end in Mr. Ratel's eyes. They didn't. Old man ratel, he was standing on
his hind-legs, with his sturdy paws in front of his eyes--like a man who
looks across a sunny land--and seemed just about to turn a somersault
again. He changed his mind, though, when the poison, that would have
blinded him for life--and that life wouldn't have been long in that wild
_then_, I want to tell you--stopped, and he went in at that black-necked,
legless, soulless servant of Satan, utterly and amazingly unafraid. It
was fine.

Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell