ar, just audible on the waft of
stillness, came a succession of hollow, coughing roars.

"Don't send up your hopes too high, Ancram," said Lamont, emitting quick
puffs from his pipe. "You may not get a show at them after all. Lions
are very sporadic. Here to-night, fifty miles off to-morrow morning."

Ancram devoutly hoped these might be five hundred miles off, as he
answered--

"Ah yes. That's the beastly bore of it. I'd like to have had a shot at
them, I must say."

"Oh, we'll fix you up with that, sooner or later, sonny, never fear,"
said Peters cheerfully. "If not to-morrow, later on we'll worry up a
trip, and it'll be hard if we don't turn you out a big 'un."

Then a friendly wrangle ensued between Lamont and Peters as to whether
wild animals, and especially lions, would come into houses after
anything. Lamont declared they wouldn't, and Peters cited instances
where they had, not at first hand however; and at length by the time the
guest was told off to his makeshift couch in the living-room, he was so
worked up to the terrors of this strange wild land, to which he had been
fool enough to come, that he spent half the night wondering whether the
outer door would for a moment resist the furious rush of a famished
beast, or whether the window was of sufficient width to admit such.

Whereby it is manifest that Lamont and the other had taken in the
stranger in more ways than one.

CHAPTER FOUR.

PETERS--PROSPECTOR.

It was lunch time at Peters' prospecting camp, and Peters, seated on a
pile of old sacks, was busy opening a bully-beef tin. Having extracted
its indifferently appetising contents, by dint of shaking out the same
on to an enamelled metal plate, he chucked the empty tin away over his
shoulder, thus mechanically adding another `brick' to a sort of
crescent-shaped miniature wall, some ten feet behind, which had been
formed gradually out of exactly similar tins, and by a similar
mechanical process. Three native `boys,' squatted at a respectful
distance, were puffing at their pipes and conversing in a drowsy hum,
the burden of their debate being as to whose turn it might be to consume
such remnants of the repast as their master might leave: such being, of
course, a thing apart from, and outside of, their regular rations.

In the forefront was a windlass and a vast pile of earth and stones, for
Peters was sinking a shaft. Two hastily run-up huts served to house the
said boys, between whic