ding on the north
shore of the lake. We prayed they might get Schillingschen, yet they
and he persisted until morning--they roaring and circling never near
enough for the man on guard to get a shot--he also circling the camp,
calling to his ten men, whom we had transferred from the native village
to the second tent under guard of Kazimoto and our own men as a
precaution.

Our boys slept as if drugged, but not his. He called to them in a
language that even Kazimoto did not understand, and they kept answering
at intervals. Once, when I was listening to locate Schillingschen if I
could, the lions came sniffing and snuffing to the back side of the
tent. I tried to stalk them--a rash, reprehensible, tenderfoot trick.
Luck was with me; they slunk away in the shadows, and I lived to
summon Fred and Will. We tried to save the donkeys, but the lions took
three of them at their leisure, and scared the rest so that they broke
out of the thorn-bush boma we had made the boys build (as a precaution
against leopards, not lions). Next morning out of forty we recovered
twenty-five, and wondered how many of them Schillingschen got.

Remembering how we ourselves had managed, without ammunition or
supplies, we did not fool ourselves with the belief that
Schillingschen, with his brutal personal magnetism and profound
knowledge of natives, would not do better. The probability was he
would stir up the countryside against us.

He had been doing missionary work; it might be the natives of that
part were already sufficiently schooled to do murder at his bidding.

We decided to leave at once for a district where he had not yet done
any of his infernal preaching.

"You should set a trap and shoot the swine!" Coutlass insisted. Will
was inclined to agree with him, but Fred and I demurred. The British
writ had never really run as far as the slopes of Elgon, and we could
see them ahead of us not very many marches away. If Schillingschen
intended to dog us and watch chances we preferred to have him do that
in a remote wilderness, where our prospect of influencing natives would
likely be as good as his, that was all.

Part of our strategy was to make an early start and march swiftly,
taking advantage of his physical weariness after a night in the open on
the prowl; but after a few days in camp it is the most difficult thing
imaginable to get a crowd of porters started on the march. It was more
particularly difficult on that occasion b