A Tale Of Three Lions

• Chapter 1. The Interest On Ten Shillings
  
• Chapter 2. What Was Found In The Pool
  
• Chapter 3. Jim-Jim Is Avenged
  

Most of you will have heard that Allan Quatermain, who was one of the
party that discovered King Solomon’s mines some little time ago, and who
afterwards came to live in England near his friend Sir Henry Curtis, went
back to the wilderness again, as these old hunters almost invariably do, on
one pretext or another.*

[* This of course was written before Mr. Quatermain’s
account of the adventures in the newly-discovered country of Zu-Vendis of
himself, Sir Henry Curtis, and Capt. John Good had been received in England.
—Editor. ]

They cannot endure civilization for very long, its noise and racket and
the omnipresence of broad-clothed humanity proving more trying to their
nerves than the dangers of the desert. I think that they feel lonely here,
for it is a fact that is too little understood, though it has often been
stated, that there is no loneliness like the loneliness of crowds, especially
to those who are unaccustomed to them. “What is there in the world,” old
Quatermain would say, “so desolate as to stand in the streets of a great city
and listen to the footsteps falling, falling, multitudinous as the rain, and
watch the white line of faces as they hurry past, you know not whence, you
know not whither? They come and go, their eyes meet yours with a cold stare,
for a moment their features are written on your mind, and then they are gone
for ever. You will never see them again; they will never see you again; they
come up out of the unknown, and presently they once more vanish into the
unknown, taking their secrets with them. Yes, that is loneliness pure and
undefiled; but to one who knows and loves it, the wilderness is not lonely,
because the spirit of nature is ever there to keep the wanderer company. He
finds companions in the winds—the sunny streams babble like Nature’s
children at his feet; high above them, in the purple sunset, are domes and
minarets and palaces, such as no mortal man has built, in and out of whose
flaming doors the angels of the sun seem to move continually. And there, too,
is the wild game, following its feeding-grounds in great armies, with the
springbuck thrown out before for skirmishers; then rank upon rank of
long-faced blesbuck, marching and wheeling like infantry; and last the
shining troops of quagga, and the fierce-eyed shaggy vilderbeeste to take, as
it were, the place of the cossack host that hangs upon an army’s flanks.

“Oh, no,” he would say, “the wilderness is not lonely, for, my boy,
remember that the further you get from man, the nearer you grow to God,” and
though this is a saying that might well be disputed, it is one I am sure that
anybody will easily understand who has watched the sun rise and set on the
limitless deserted plains, and seen the thunder chariots of the clouds roll
in majesty across the depths of unfathomable sky.

Well, at any rate we went back again, and now for many months I have heard
nothing at all of him, and to be frank, I greatly doubt if anybody will ever
hear of him again. I fear that the wilderness, that has for so many years
been a mother to him, will now also prove his grave and the grave of those
who accompanied him, for the quest upon which he and they have started is a
wild one indeed.

But while he was in England for those three years or so between his return
from the successful discovery of the wise king’s buried treasures, and the
death of his only son, I saw a great deal of old Allan Quatermain. I had
known him years before in Africa, and after he came home, whenever I had
nothing better to do, I used to run up to Yorkshire and stay with him, and in
this way I at one time and another heard many of the incidents of his past
life, and most curious some of them were. No man can pass all those years
following the rough existence of an elephant-hunter without meeting with many
strange adventures, and in one way and another old Quatermain has certainly
seen his share. Well, the story that I am going to tell you in the following
pages is one of the later of these adventures, though I forget the exact year
in which it happened. at any rate I know that it was the only trip upon which
he took his son Harry (who is since dead) with him, and that Harry was then
about fourteen. And now for the story, which I will repeat, as nearly as I
can, in the words in which Hunter Quatermain told it to me one night in the
old oak- panelled vestibule of his house in Yorkshire. We were talking about
gold-mining -

“Gold-mining!” he broke in; “ah! yes, I once went gold-mining at Pilgrims’
Rest in the Transvaal, and it was after that that we had the business about
Jim-Jim and the lions. Do you know Pilgrim’s Rest? Well, it is, or was, one
of the queerest little places you ever saw. The town itself was pitched in a
stony valley, with mountains all about it, and in the middle of such scenery
as one does not often get the chance of seeing. Many and many is the time
that I have thrown down my pick and shovel in disgust, clambered out of my
claim, and walked a couple of miles or so to the top of some hill. Then I
would lie down in the grass and look out over the glorious stretch of country
—the smiling valleys, the great mountains touched with gold—
real gold of the sunset, and clothed in sweeping robes of bush, and stare
into the depths of the perfect sky above; yes, and thank Heaven I had got
away from the cursing and the coarse jokes of the miners, and the voices of
those Basutu Kaffirs as they toiled in the sun, the memory of which is with
me yet.

“Well, for some months I dug away patiently at my claim, till the very
sight of a pick or of a washing-trough became hateful to me. A hundred times
a day I lamented my own folly in having invested eight hundred pounds, which
was about all that I was worth at the time, in this gold-mining. But like
other better people before me, I had been bitten by the gold bug, and now was
forced to take the consequences. I bought a claim out of which a man had made
a fortune—five or six thousand pounds at least—as I thought,
very cheap; that is, I gave him five hundred pounds down for it. It was all
that I had made by a very rough year’s elephant-hunting beyond the Zambesi,
and I sighed deeply and prophetically when I saw my successful friend, who
was a Yankee, sweep up the roll of Standard Bank notes with the lordly air of
the man who has made his fortune, and cram them into his breeches pockets.
‘Well,’ I said to him—the happy vendor—’it is a magnificent
property, and I only hope that my luck will be as good as yours has
been.’

“He smiled; to my excited nerves it seemed that he smiled ominously, as he
answered me in a peculiar Yankee drawl: ‘I guess, stranger, as I ain’t the
one to make a man quarrel with his food, more especial when there ain’t no
more going of the rounds; and as for that there claim, well, she’s been a
good nigger to me; but between you and me, stranger, speaking man to man, now
that there ain’t any filthy lucre between us to obscure the features of the
truth, I guess she’s about worked out!’

“I gasped; the fellow’s effrontery took the breath out of me. Only five
minutes before he had been swearing by all his gods—and they appeared
to be numerous and mixed—that there were half a dozen fortunes left
in the claim, and that he was only giving it up because he was downright
weary of shovelling the gold out.

“‘Don’t look so vexed, stranger,’ went on my tormentor, ‘perhaps there is
some shine in the old girl yet; anyway you are a downright good fellow, you
are, therefore you will, I guess, have a real A1 opportunity of working on
the feelings of Fortune. Anyway it will bring the muscle up upon your arm,
for the stuff is uncommon stiff, and, what is more, you will in the course of
a year earn a sight more than two thousand dollars in value of
experience.’

“Then he went just in time, for in another moment I should have gone for
him, and I saw his face no more.

“Well, I set to work on the old claim with my boy Harry and half a dozen
Kaffirs to help me, which, seeing that I had put nearly all my worldly wealth
into it, was the least that I could do. And we worked, my word, we did work
—early and late we went at it—but never a bit of gold did we
see; no, not even a nugget large enough to make a scarf-pin out of. The
American gentleman had secured it all and left us the sweepings.

“For three months this went on, till at last I had paid away all, or very
near all, that was left of her little capital in wages and food for the
Kaffirs and ourselves. When I tell you that Boer meal was sometimes as high
as four pounds a bag, you will understand that it did not take long to run
through our banking account.

“At last the crisis came. One Saturday night I had paid the men as usual,
and bought a muid of mealie meal at sixty shillings for them to fill
themselves with, and then I went with my boy Harry and sat on the edge of the
great hole that we had dug in the hill-side, and which we had in bitter
mockery named Eldorado. There we sat in the moonlight with our feet over the
edge of the claim, and were melancholy enough for anything. Presently I
pulled out my purse and emptied its contents into my hand. There was a
half-sovereign, two florins, ninepence in silver, no coppers—for
copper practically does not circulate in South Africa, which is one of the
things that make living so dear there—in all exactly fourteen and
ninepence.

“‘There, Harry, my boy!’ I said, ‘that is the sum total of our worldly
wealth; that hole has swallowed all the rest.’

“‘By George!’ said Master Harry; ‘I say, father, you and I shall have to
let ourselves out to work with the Kaffirs and live on mealie pap,’ and he
sniggered at his unpleasant little joke.

“But I was in no mood for joking, for it is not a merry thing to dig like
anything for months and be completely ruined in the process, especially if
you happen to dislike digging, and consequently I resented Harry’s light-
heartedness.

“‘Be quiet, boy!’ I said, raising my hand as though to give him a cuff,
with the result that the half-sovereign slipped out of it and fell into the
gulf below.

“‘Oh, bother,’ said I, ‘it’s gone.’

“‘There, Dad,’ said Harry, ‘that’s what comes of letting your angry
passions rise; now we are down to four and nine.’

“I made no answer to these words of wisdom, but scrambled down the steep
sides of the claim, followed by Harry, to hunt for my little all. Well, we
hunted and we hunted, but the moonlight is an uncertain thing to look for
half- sovereigns by, and there was some loose soil about, for the Kaffirs had
knocked off working at this very spot a couple of hours before. I took a pick
and raked away the clods of earth with it, in the hope of finding the coin;
but all in vain. At last in sheer annoyance I struck the sharp end of the
pickaxe down into the soil, which was of a very hard nature. To my
astonishment it sunk in right up to the haft.

“‘Why, Harry,’ I said, ‘this ground must have been disturbed!’

“‘I don’t think so, father,’ he answered; ‘but we will soon see,’ and he
began to shovel out the soil with his hands. ‘Oh,’ he said presently, ‘it’s
only some old stones; the pick has gone down between them, look!’ and he
began to pull at one of the stones.

“‘I say, Dad,’ he said presently, almost in a whisper, ‘it’s precious
heavy, feel it;’ and he rose and gave me a round, brownish lump about the
size of a very large apple, which he was holding in both his hands. I took it
curiously and held it up to the light. It
was
very heavy. The
moonlight fell upon its rough and filth-encrusted surface, and as I looked,
curious little thrills of excitement began to pass through me. But I could
not be sure.

“‘Give me your knife, Harry,’ I said.

“He did so, and resting the brown stone on my knee I scratched at its
surface. Great heavens, it was soft!

“Another second and the secret was out, we had found a great nugget of
pure gold, four pounds of it or more. ‘It’s gold, lad,’ I said, ‘it’s gold,
or I’m a Dutchman!’

“Harry, with his eyes starting out of his head, glared down at the
gleaming yellow scratch that I had made upon the virgin metal, and then burst
out into yell upon yell of exultation, which went ringing away across the
silent claims like shrieks of somebody being murdered.

“‘Be quiet!’ I said; ‘do you want every thief on the fields after
you?’

“Scarcely were the words out of my mouth when I heard a stealthy footstep
approaching. I promptly put the big nugget down and sat on it, and uncommonly
hard it was. As I did so I saw a lean dark face poked over the edge of the
claim and a pair of beady eyes searching us out. I knew the face, it belonged
to a man of very bad character known as Handspike Tom, who had, I understood,
been so named at the Diamond Fields because he had murdered his mate with a
handspike. He was now no doubt prowling about like a human hyæna to see
what he could steal.