"Jump, man!"
The words were no sooner out of my mouth than over he came, striking the water within a couple of yards of our boat.
We dragged him aboard, as though he were some huge, wet fish, thrown up unexpectedly from the deep; and then we held a council of war.
To have attempted to locate and shoot an enraged gorilla on board a vessel which was a hive of shelters and shadows would have been running risks that no one but a lunatic would have faced. Far simpler and safer to wait until morning. The gorilla is not an animal which will swim, even under the greatest provocation. Consequently, there was no fear of his taking his glands away with him in the dead of night.
"Do you think any of the others have escaped?" I asked Captain Morgan.
"Can't say! That fellow was most likely the one we had to put by himself because of his vile temper. If he is one of the twenty in the big cage, then the rest of them must be free—or soon will be!"
This seemed logical enough.
"It will be a pity if we have to kill the whole lot of the brutes," said Croft. "We could never capture them alive."
I agreed. Shooting gorillas is not sport; it seems too much like murdering one's fellow creatures—a form of enlightenment laudable only in human warfare. Quite apart from this, it was our intention to replace the gorilla's glands with live goat glands—an absurd, unfruitful operation to perform on a dead animal.
"Hadn't we better get ashore?" asked Captain Morgan rather abruptly. "I don't like hanging about in these wet clothes."