s sitting near me, "you've reached
the right man for that; Hunter Quatermain should be able to tell you
about elephants if anybody can."

Sir Henry, who had been sitting quite quiet listening to our talk,
started visibly.

"Excuse me, sir," he said, leaning forward across the table, and
speaking in a low deep voice, a very suitable voice, it seemed to me,
to come out of those great lungs. "Excuse me, sir, but is your name
Allan Quatermain?"

I said that it was.

The big man made no further remark, but I heard him mutter "fortunate"
into his beard.

Presently dinner came to an end, and as we were leaving the saloon Sir
Henry strolled up and asked me if I would come into his cabin to smoke
a pipe. I accepted, and he led the way to the _Dunkeld_ deck cabin, and
a very good cabin it is. It had been two cabins, but when Sir Garnet
Wolseley or one of those big swells went down the coast in the
_Dunkeld_, they knocked away the partition and have never put it up
again. There was a sofa in the cabin, and a little table in front of
it. Sir Henry sent the steward for a bottle of whisky, and the three of
us sat down and lit our pipes.

"Mr. Quatermain," said Sir Henry Curtis, when the man had brought the
whisky and lit the lamp, "the year before last about this time, you
were, I believe, at a place called Bamangwato, to the north of the
Transvaal."

"I was," I answered, rather surprised that this gentleman should be so
well acquainted with my movements, which were not, so far as I was
aware, considered of general interest.

"You were trading there, were you not?" put in Captain Good, in his
quick way.

"I was. I took up a wagon-load of goods, made a camp outside the
settlement, and stopped till I had sold them."

Sir Henry was sitting opposite to me in a Madeira chair, his arms
leaning on the table. He now looked up, fixing his large grey eyes full
upon my face. There was a curious anxiety in them, I thought.

"Did you happen to meet a man called Neville there?"

"Oh, yes; he outspanned alongside of me for a fortnight to rest his
oxen before going on to the interior. I had a letter from a lawyer a
few months back, asking me if I knew what had become of him, which I
answered to the best of my ability at the time."

"Yes," said Sir Henry, "your letter was forwarded to me. You said in it
that the gentleman called Neville left Bamangwato at the beginning of
May in a wagon with a driver, a voorlooper, and a Kafir hunte