ough they would almost surely close again. I
took my stand in line with that, as a man on trial for life takes
refuge behind an unestablishable alibi.

They talk glibly about men's whole lives passing in review before them
in the instant of a crisis. That may be. That was a crisis, and I saw
elephants--elephants! I remembered some of what Courtney had told
us--some of the mad yarns Coutlass spun when liquor and the camp-fire
made him boastful. All the advice I ever heard; all my previous
imaginings of what I should do when such a time came, seemed to be
condensed into one concrete demand--shoot, shoot, shoot, and keep on
shooting! Yet my finger, bent around the trigger, absolutely would not
act!

The oncoming gray wave of brutes split apart at the rock, as it must
do, some of them screaming as they crashed into it breast on and were
crushed by the crowd behind. In the van of the right-hand wing,
brushing the rock with his shoulder, charged an enormous bull with
tusks so large that the heavier had weighed down his head to a
permanent rakish angle. He caught sight of me--trumpeted like a siren
in the Channel fog--and came at me with raised ears and trunk
outstretched. I heard shooting to the left, and more shots from the
forest, where the very active ghost or madman was keeping up a battle
of his own. I felt the fear, that turns a man's very heart to ice,
grip hold of me--felt as if nothing mattered--imagined the whole
universe a sea of charging elephants--accepted the inevitable--and
suddenly received my manhood back again! My forefinger acted! I fired
point-blank down the throat of the charging bull. And it seemed to
have no more effect on him than a pea-shooter has on a railroad train!

I had left Schillingschen's heavy-bored elephant gun behind with Brown,
considering it too cumbersome, and was using a Mauser with flat-nosed
bullets. I fired four shots as fast as I could pump them from the
magazine straight down the monster's hot red throat; and he continued
to come on as if I had not touched him, hard-pressed on either flank by
bulls nearly as big as he.

Perhaps the reason why my past history did not flash review was that my
time was not yet come! I continued to see elephant--nothing but
elephant!--little bloodshot eyes aflame with frenzy--great tusks
upthrown--a trunk upraised to brain me--huge flat feet that raged to
tread me down and knead me into purple mud! I kept the last shot with
a cooln