ddenly we heard an elephant
scream, and saw its huge and rushing form with uplifted trunk and tail
silhouetted against the great fiery globe of the sun. Next second we
saw something else, and that was Good and Khiva tearing back towards us
with the wounded bull--for it was he--charging after them. For a moment
we did not dare to fire--though at that distance it would have been of
little use if we had done so--for fear of hitting one of them, and the
next a dreadful thing happened--Good fell a victim to his passion for
civilised dress. Had he consented to discard his trousers and gaiters
like the rest of us, and to hunt in a flannel shirt and a pair of
veldt-schoons, it would have been all right. But as it was, his
trousers cumbered him in that desperate race, and presently, when he
was about sixty yards from us, his boot, polished by the dry grass,
slipped, and down he went on his face right in front of the elephant.

We gave a gasp, for we knew that he must die, and ran as hard as we
could towards him. In three seconds it had ended, but not as we
thought. Khiva, the Zulu boy, saw his master fall, and brave lad as he
was, turned and flung his assegai straight into the elephant's face. It
stuck in his trunk.

With a scream of pain, the brute seized the poor Zulu, hurled him to
the earth, and placing one huge foot on to his body about the middle,
twined its trunk round his upper part and _tore him in two_.

We rushed up mad with horror, and fired again and again, till presently
the elephant fell upon the fragments of the Zulu.

As for Good, he rose and wrung his hands over the brave man who had
given his life to save him, and, though I am an old hand, I felt a lump
grow in my throat. Umbopa stood contemplating the huge dead elephant
and the mangled remains of poor Khiva.

"Ah, well," he said presently, "he is dead, but he died like a man!"

CHAPTER V

OUR MARCH INTO THE DESERT

We had killed nine elephants, and it took us two days to cut out the
tusks, and having brought them into camp, to bury them carefully in the
sand under a large tree, which made a conspicuous mark for miles round.
It was a wonderfully fine lot of ivory. I never saw a better, averaging
as it did between forty and fifty pounds a tusk. The tusks of the great
bull that killed poor Khiva scaled one hundred and seventy pounds the
pair, so nearly as we could judge.

As for Khiva himself, we buried what remained of him in an ant-bear
hole, to