vultures, or jackals and the
ants. We saw no sense that night in laboring with a knife and our
hands to bury a body that the brutes would dig up again within five
minutes of our leaving it.

"Schillingschen has three cartridges,"' sad Will. "One each for you, me
and Fred Oakes! I'll stay and trick him some more. I'll think up a
new plan. I don't care if he gets me. I'd hate to face Fred without
my rifle, and have to tell him the enemy is laying for him with it
through my carelessness."

It was my first experience of Will with hysteria, for it amounted to
that. I remembered that to cure a bevy of school-girls of it one
should rap out something sharply, with a cane if need be. Yet Will was
not like a school-girl, and his hysteria took the pseudo-manly form of
refusal to retreat. I yearned for Fred's camp-fires, and Fred's laugh,
hot supper, or breakfast, or whatever the meal would be, and blankets.
Will, with a ruthless murderer stalking him in the dark, yearned only
for self-contentment. All at once I saw the thing to do, and thrust my
rifle in his hands.

"Take it," I said. "Hunt Schillingschen all night if you want to. I'm
going back to tell Fred I've lost my rifle, and was afraid to face you
for fear you'd laugh at me. Go on--take it! No, you've got to take
it!"

I let the rifle fall at his feet, and he was forced to pick it up. By
that time I was on my way, and he had to hurry if he hoped to catch me.
I kept him hurrying--cursing, and calling out to wait. And so, hours
later, we arrived in sight of Fred's fires and answered his cheery
challenge:

"Halt there, or I'll shoot your bally head off!"

Lions had kept him busy making the boys pile thornwood on the fires.
He had shot two--one inside the enclosure, where the brute had jumped
in a vain effort to reach the frantic donkeys. We stumbled over the
carcass of the other as we made our way toward the gate-gap, and
dragged it in ignominiously by the tail (not such an easy task as the
uninitiated might imagine).

Once within the enclosure I left Will to tell Fred his story as best
suited him, Fred roaring with laughter as he watched Will's rueful
face, yet turning suddenly on Brown to curse him like a criminal for
laughing, too!

"Go and fetch that Mauser of yours, Brown, and give it to Mr. Yerkes in
place of what he's lost! Hurry, please!"

It was touch and go whether Brown would obey. But he happened to be
sober, and realized that he had