"All the way—and then some!"
At this point the exchange butted in with the simple explanation that my time limit was up.
"Bye-bye!" I said. "I'll drop you a line. . . ."
I hung up the receiver, emerged from my box, and hurried out into the sunlight again.
So that was that!
When I was in my right mind again I would write to my Lords the Commissioners, and confirm my telephone message, but in my present mood I should have found it impossible to sit down and subscribe myself as their obedient servant, George Barnett. It was so palpably untrue. I was nobody's servant this morning—nobody's!
Back in the town again the whim seized me to go into the Public Library and glean a few interesting tit-bits about the gentle gorilla and its playful ways. So I consulted the librarian, borrowed Du Chaillu's "Equatorial Africa," and sat down and commenced reading.
It was an absorbing book; and on that bright, adventurous morning it gripped me more fiercely than the finest love story ever written. Parts of it made me shiver, and yet they fascinated. The description of one disastrous encounter with a gorilla ran as follows:—
"We picked him (a native) up and I dressed his wounds as well as I could with rags torn from my clothes. When I had given him a little brandy he came to himself and was able, but with great difficulty, to speak. He said that he had met the gorilla suddenly and face to face, and that it had not attempted to escape. It was, he said, a huge male, and seemed very savage. It was in a very gloomy part of the wood, and the darkness, I suppose, made him miss. He said he took good aim, and fired when the beast was only about eight yards off. The ball merely wounded it in the side. It at once began beating its breasts, and with the greatest rage advanced upon him.
"To run away was impossible. He would have been caught in the jungle before he had gone a dozen steps.
"He stood his ground, and, as quickly as he could, reloaded his gun. Just as he raised it to fire the gorilla dashed it out of his hands, the gun going off in the fall; and then in an instant, and with a terrible roar, the animal gave him a tremendous blow with its immense open paw, frightfully lacerating the abdomen and with this single blow laying bare part of the intestines. As he sank bleeding to the ground, the monster seized the gun, and the poor hunter thought he would have his brains dashed out with it. But the gorilla seemed to have looked upon this as an enemy, and in his rage almost flattened the barrel between his strong jaws.
"This is their mode when attacked—to strike one or two blows, and then leave the victims of their rage on the ground and go off into the woods. . . ."
I was impressed. And, when I thought of Gran'pa's intention of taking these huge, muscular, six-foot brutes alive and unharmed, I was almost stupefied. It seemed impossible. Indeed, the writer of the book I was reading said that up to that time (1860) no fully grown male gorilla had ever been taken alive.