ed together under him until the poor brute
perished of thirst, before it occurred to me to fire my rifle. I fired
several shots when I did think of it; but we had agreed on no system
of signals, and instead of coming to find me at once, the other two
cursed me for wasting time shooting at leopards in the dark instead of
scouting for the track. I used twenty cartridges before they came to
see what sort of battle I was waging, and with the last shot I nearly
blew Brown's helmet off as he stooped over the hole to look down in.

Then there were more precious minutes wasted while someone cut a long
pole for me to swarm up, and at the end of that time, when I stood on
firm ground at last and wiped the blood from hands and knees, we were
no wiser about the proper direction to take.

The next accident was a little before midnight. Will Yerkes was
leading, I following, next the boys, and Brown bringing up the rear
(for in those wild hills there is never a good track wide enough for
two men to march abreast. Even the cattle proceed in single file
unless driven furiously.) Will came on a leopard devouring its kill, a
fat buck, in the midst of the track in the moonlight, and the brute
resented the interruption of his meal. It slunk into the shadows
before Will could get a shot at it, and for the next two hours followed
us, slinking from shadow to shadow, snarling and growling. It plainly
intended murder, but which of us was to be the victim, and when, there
was no means of guessing, so that the nerves of all of us were tortured
every time the brute approached.

We wasted at least thirty cartridges on futile efforts to guess his
whereabouts in velvet black shadows, and Brown went through all the
stages from simple nervousness to fear, and then to frenzy, until we
feared he would shoot one of us in frantic determination to ring the
leopard's knell.

At last the brute did rush in, and of course where least expected. He
seized one of our porters by the shoulder, his claws doing more damage
than his teeth. I shot him by thrusting my rifle into his ear, and
although that dropped him instantly his claws, in the dying spasm and
by the weight of his fall, tore wounds in the man's arm eighteen or
twenty inches long.

One of the things we did have with us was bandages. But it took time
to attend to the man's wounds properly by lamp and moonlight, and after
that he could neither march fast, nor was there anywhere to leave him.