Oh, you cowards, you who would give up the chase
while the blood spoor steamed beneath your nostrils, see what I did
single-handed while you slept, and be ashamed.'
"'_Ou!_' said the men, '_ou!_ Koos! Koos y umcool!' (Chief, great
Chief!) And then they held their tongues, and going up to the three dead
beasts, gazed upon them in silence.
"But after that those men looked upon me with awe as being almost
more than mortal. No mere man, they said, could have slain those three
elephants alone in the night-time. I never had any further trouble with
them. I believe that if I had told them to jump over a precipice and
that they would take no harm, they would have believed me.
"Well, I went up and examined the bulls. Such tusks as they had I never
saw and never shall see again. It took us all day to cut them out; and
when they reached Delagoa Bay, as they did ultimately, though not in my
keeping, the single tusk of the big bull scaled one hundred and sixty
pounds, and the four other tusks averaged ninety-nine and a half
pounds--a most wonderful, indeed an almost unprecedented, lot of
ivory.[*] Unfortunately I was forced to saw the big tusk in two,
otherwise we could not have carried it."
[*] The largest elephant tusk of which the Editor has any
certain knowledge scaled one hundred and fifty pounds.
"Oh, Quatermain, you barbarian!" I broke in here, "the idea of spoiling
such a tusk! Why, I would have kept it whole if I had been obliged to
drag it myself.
Pages:
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69