A Tale Of Three Lions (2 page)

“‘Is that you, ‘unter Quatermain?’ he said.

“‘Yes, it’s I, Mr. Tom,’ I answered, politely.

“‘And what might all that there yelling be?’ he asked. ‘I was walking
along, a-taking of the evening air and a-thinking on the stars, when I ‘ears
‘owl after ‘owl.’

“‘Well, Mr. Tom,’ I answered, ‘that is not to be wondered at, seeing that
like yourself they are nocturnal birds.’

“”Owl after ‘owl!’ he repeated sternly, taking no notice of my
interpretation, ‘and I stops and says, “That’s murder,” and I listens again
and thinks, “No, it ain’t; that ‘owl is the ‘owl of hexultation; some one’s
been and got his fingers into a gummy yeller pot, I’ll swear, and gone off
‘is ‘ead in the sucking of them.” Now, ‘unter Quatermain, is I right? is it
nuggets? Oh, lor!’ and he smacked his lips audibly—’great big yellow
boys—is it them that you have just been and tumbled across?’

“‘No,’ I said boldly, ‘it isn’t’—the cruel gleam in his black eyes
altogether overcoming my aversion to untruth, for I knew that if once he
found out what it was that I was sitting on—and by the way I have
heard of rolling in gold being spoken of as a pleasant process, but I
certainly do not recommend anybody who values comfort to try sitting on it
—I should run a very good chance of being ‘handspiked’ before the
night was over.

“‘If you want to know what it was, Mr. Tom,’ I went on, with my politest
air, although in agony from the nugget underneath—for I hold it is
always best to be polite to a man who is so ready with a handspike—
‘my boy and I have had a slight difference of opinion, and I was enforcing my
view of the matter upon him; that’s all.’

“‘Yes, Mr. Tom,’ put in Harry, beginning to weep, for Harry was a smart
boy, and saw the difficulty we were in, ‘that was it—I halloed
because father beat me.’

“‘Well, now, did yer, my dear boy—did yer? Well, all I can say is
that a played-out old claim is a wonderful queer sort of place to come to for
to argify at ten o’clock of night, and what’s more, my sweet youth, if ever I
should ‘ave the argifying of yer’—and he leered unpleasantly at Harry
—’yer won’t ‘oller in quite such a jolly sort ‘o way. And now I’ll be
saying good-night, for I don’t like disturbing of a family party. No, I ain’t
that sort of man, I ain’t. Good-night to yer, ‘unter Quatermain—
good-night to yer, my argified young one;’ and Mr. Tom turned away
disappointed, and prowled off elsewhere, like a human jackal, to see what he
could thieve or kill.

“‘Thank goodness!’ I said, as I slipped off the lump of gold. ‘Now, then,
do you get up, Harry, and see if that consummate villain has gone.’ Harry did
so, and reported that he had vanished towards Pilgrim’s Rest, and then we set
to work, and very carefully, but trembling with excitement, with our hands
hollowed out all the space of ground into which I had struck the pick. Yes,
as I hoped, there was a regular nest of nuggets, twelve in all, running from
the size of a hazel-nut to that of a hen’s egg, though of course the first
one was much larger than that. How they all came there nobody can say; it was
one of those extraordinary freaks, with stories of which, at any rate, all
people acquainted with alluvial gold-mining will be familiar. It turned out
afterwards that the American who sold me the claim had in the same way made
his pile—a much larger one than ours, by the way—out of a
single pocket, and then worked for six months without seeing colour, after
which he gave it up.

“At any rate, there the nuggets were, to the value, as it turned out
afterwards, of about twelve hundred and fifty pounds, so that after all I
took out of that hole four hundred and fifty pounds more than I put into it.
We got them all out and wrapped them up in a handkerchief, and then, fearing
to carry home so much treasure, especially as we knew that Mr. Handspike Tom
was on the prowl, made up our minds to pass the night where we were—a
necessity which, disagreeable as it was, was wonderfully sweetened by the
presence of that handkerchief full of virgin gold—the interest of my
lost half- sovereign.

“Slowly the night wore away, for with the fear of Handspike Tom before my
eyes I did not dare to go to sleep, and at last the dawn came. I got up and
watched its growth, till it opened like a flower upon the eastern sky, and
the sunbeams began to spring up in splendour from mountain-top to
mountain-top. I watched it, and as I did so it flashed upon me, with a
complete conviction which I had not felt before, that I had had enough of
gold-mining to last me the rest of my natural life, and I then and there made
up my mind to clear out of Pilgrims’ Rest and go and shoot buffalo towards
Delagoa Bay. Then I turned, took the pick and shovel, and although it was a
Sunday morning, woke up Harry and set to work to see if there were any more
nuggets about. As I expected, there were none. What we had got had lain
together in a little pocket filled with soil that felt quite different from
the stiff stuff round and outside the pocket. There was not another trace of
gold. Of course it is possible that there were more pocketfuls somewhere
about, but all I have to say is I made up my mind that, whoever found them, I
should not; and, as a matter of fact, I have since heard that this claim has
been the ruin of two or three people, as it very nearly was the ruin of
me.

“‘Harry,’ I said presently, ‘I am going away this week towards Delagoa to
shoot buffalo. Shall I take you with me, or send you down to Durban?’

“‘Oh, take me with you, father!’ begged Harry, ‘I want to kill a
buffalo!’

“‘And supposing that the buffalo kills you instead?’ I asked.

“‘Oh, never mind,’ he said, gaily, ‘there are lots more where I came
from.’

“I rebuked him for his flippancy, but in the end I consented to take
him.

“Something over a fortnight had passed since the night when I lost half-a-
sovereign and found twelve hundred and fifty pounds in looking for it, and
instead of that horrid hole, for which, after all, Eldorado was hardly a
misnomer, a very different scene stretched away before us clad in the silver
robe of the moonlight. We were camped—Harry and I, two Kaffirs, a
Scotch cart, and six oxen—on the swelling side of a great wave of
bushclad land. Just where we had made our camp, however, the bush was very
sparse, and only grew about in clumps, while here and there were single flat-
topped mimosa-trees. To our right a little stream, which had cut a deep
channel for itself in the bosom of the slope, flowed musically on between
banks green with maidenhair, wild asparagus, and many beautiful grasses. The
bed-rock here was red granite, and in the course of centuries of patient
washing the water had hollowed out some of the huge slabs in its path into
great troughs and cups, and these we used for bathing-places. No Roman lady,
with her baths of porphyry or alabaster, could have had a more delicious spot
to bathe herself than we found within fifty yards of our skerm, or rough
inclosure of mimosa thorn, that we had dragged together round the cart to
protect us from the attacks of lions. That there were several of these brutes
about, I knew from their spoor, though we had neither heard nor seen
them.

“Our bath was a little nook where the eddy of the stream had washed away a
mass of soil, and on the edge of it there grew a most beautiful old mimosa
thorn. Beneath the thorn was a large smooth slab of granite fringed all round
with maidenhair and other ferns, that sloped gently down to a pool of the
clearest sparkling water, which lay in a bowl of granite about ten feet wide
by five feet deep in the centre. Here to this slab we went every morning to
bathe, and that delightful bath is among the most pleasant of my hunting
reminiscences, as it is also, for reasons which will presently appear, among
the most painful.

“It was a lovely night. Harry and I sat to the windward of the fire, where
the two Kaffirs were busily employed in cooking some impala steaks off a buck
which Harry, to his great joy, had shot that morning, and were as perfectly
contented with ourselves and the world at large as two people could possibly
be. The night was beautiful, and it would require somebody with more words on
the tip of his tongue than I have to describe properly the chastened majesty
of those moonlit wilds. Away for ever and for ever, away to the mysterious
north, rolled the great bush ocean over which the silence brooded. There
beneath us a mile or more to the right ran the wide Oliphant, and mirror-
like flashed back the moon, whose silver spears were shivered on its breast,
and then tossed in twisted lines of light far and wide about the mountains
and the plain. Down upon the river-banks grew great timber-trees that through
the stillness pointed solemnly to Heaven, and the beauty of the night lay
upon them like a cloud. Everywhere was silence—silence in the starred
depths, silence on the bosom of the sleeping earth. Now, if ever, great
thoughts might rise in a man’s mind, and for a space he might forget his
littleness in the sense that he partook of the pure immensity about him.

“‘Hark! what was that?’

“From far away down by the river there comes a mighty rolling sound, then
another, and another. It is the lion seeking his meat.

“I saw Harry shiver and turn a little pale. He was a plucky boy enough,
but the roar of a lion heard for the first time in the solemn bush veldt at
night is apt to shake the nerves of any lad.

“‘Lions, my boy,’ I said; ‘they are hunting down by the river there; but I
don’t think that you need make yourself uneasy. We have been here three
nights now, and if they were going to pay us a visit I think that they would
have done so before this. However, we will make up the fire.’

“‘Here, Pharaoh, do you and Jim-Jim get some more wood before we go to
sleep, else the cats will be purring round you before morning.’

“Pharaoh, a great brawny Swazi, who had been working for me at Pilgrims’
Rest, laughed, rose, and stretched himself, then calling to Jim-Jim to bring
the axe and a reim, started off in the moonlight towards a clump of
sugar-bush where we cut our fuel from some dead trees. He was a fine fellow
in his way, was Pharaoh, and I think that he had been named Pharaoh because
he had an Egyptian cast of countenance and a royal sort of swagger about him.
But his way was a somewhat peculiar way, on account of the uncertainty of his
temper, and very few people could get on with him; also if he could find
liquor he would drink like a fish, and when he drank he became shockingly
bloodthirsty. These were his bad points; his good ones were that, like most
people of the Zulu blood, he became exceedingly attached if he took to you at
all; he was a hard- working and intelligent man, and about as dare-devil and
plucky a fellow at a pinch as I have ever had to do with. He was about
five-and-thirty years of age or so, but not a ‘keshla’ or ringed man. I
believe that he had got into trouble in some way in Swaziland, and the
authorities of his tribe would not allow him to assume the ring, and that is
why he came to work at the gold-fields. The other man, or rather lad,
Jim-Jim, was a Mapoch Kaffir, or Knobnose, and even in the light of
subsequent events I fear I cannot speak very well of him. He was an idle and
careless young rascal, and only that very morning I had to tell Pharaoh to
give him a beating for letting the oxen stray, which Pharaoh did with the
greatest gusto, although he was by way of being very fond of Jim-Jim. Indeed,
I saw him consoling Jim-Jim afterwards with a pinch of snuff from his own
ear-box, whilst he explained to him that the next time it came in the way of
duty to flog him, he meant to thrash him with the other hand, so as to cross
the old cuts and make a “pretty pattern” on his back.

“Well, off they went, though Jim-Jim did not at all like leaving the camp
at that hour, even when the moonlight was so bright, and in due course
returned safely enough with a great bundle of wood. I laughed at Jim-Jim, and
asked him if he had seen anything, and he said yes, he had; he had seen two
large yellow eyes staring at him from behind a bush, and heard something
snore.

“As, however, on further investigation the yellow eyes and the snore
appeared to have existed only in Jim-Jim’s lively imagination, I was not
greatly disturbed by this alarming report; but having seen to the making-up
of the fire, got into the skerm and went quietly to sleep with Harry by my
side.

“Some hours afterwards I woke up with a start. I don’t know what woke me.
The moon had gone down, or at least was almost hidden behind the soft horizon
of bush, only her red rim being visible. Also a wind had sprung up and was
driving long hurrying lines of cloud across the starry sky, and altogether a
great change had come over the mood of the night. By the look of the sky I
judged that we must be about two hours from day-break.

“The oxen, which were as usual tied to the disselboom of the Scotch cart,
were very restless—they kept snuffling and blowing, and rising up and
lying down again, so I at once suspected that they must wind something.
Presently I knew what it was that they winded, for within fifty yards of us a
lion roared, not very loud, but quite loud enough to make my heart come into
my mouth.

“Pharaoh was sleeping on the other side of the cart, and, looking beneath
it, I saw him raise his head and listen.

“‘Lion, Inkoos,’ he whispered, ‘lion!’

“Jim-Jim also jumped up, and by the faint light I could see that he was in
a very great fright indeed.

“Thinking that it was as well to be prepared for emergencies, I told
Pharaoh to throw wood upon the fire, and woke up Harry, who I verily believe
was capable of sleeping happily through the crack of doom. He was a little
scared at first, but presently the excitement of the position came home to
him, and he grew quite anxious to see his majesty face to face. I got my
rifle handy and gave Harry his—a Westley Richards falling block,
which is a very useful gun for a youth, being light and yet a good killing
rifle, and then we waited.