t, and now what was I to do with scarcely three
hundred pounds, a good stock of guns and this little Durban property
left to me in the world? Commerce in all its shapes I renounced once
and for ever. It was too high--or too low--for me; so it would seem that
there remained to me only my old business of professional hunting. Once
again I must seek those adventures which I had forsworn when my evil
star shone so brightly over a gold mine. What was it to be? Elephants, I
supposed, since these are the only creatures worth killing from a money
point of view. But most of my old haunts had been more or less shot out.
The competition of younger professionals, of wandering backveld Boers
and even of poaching natives who had obtained guns, was growing severe.
If I went at all I should have to travel farther afield.

Whilst I meditated thus, turning over the comparative advantages
or disadvantages of various possible hunting grounds in my mind, my
attention was caught by a kind of cough that seemed to proceed from the
farther side of a large gardenia bush. It was not a human cough, but
rather resembled that made by a certain small buck at night, probably
to signal to its mate, which of course it could not be as there were no
buck within several miles. Yet I knew it came from a human throat, for
had I not heard it before in many an hour of difficulty and danger?

"Draw near, Hans," I said in Dutch, and instantly out of a clump of
aloes that grew in front of the pomegranate hedge, crept the withered
shape of the old Hottentot, as a big yellow snake might do. Why he
should choose this method of advance instead of that offered by the
garden path I did not know, but it was quite in accordance with his
secretive nature, inherited from a hundred generations of ancestors who
spent their lives avoiding the observation of murderous foes.

He squatted down in front of me, staring in a vacant way at the fierce
ball of the westering sun without blinking an eyelid, just as a vulture
does.

"You look to me as though you had been fighting, Hans," I said. "The
crown of your hat is knocked out; you are splashed with mud and there is
the mark of a stick upon your left side."

"Yes, Baas. You are right as usual, Baas. I had a quarrel with a man
about sixpence that he owed me, and knocked him over with my head,
forgetting to take my hat off first. Therefore it is spoiled, for which
I am sorry, as it was quite a new hat, not two years old. The Baas