Standing up, and raising a hand for silence, Gran'pa began speaking in his clear, steady voice.
"Gentlemen," he said, with dramatic simplicity, "the hour is at hand."
I saw one old man in the audience blow his nose and wipe away some tears which had gathered in his eyes. Another was trembling from head to foot with excitement. Still another seemed to be on the verge of fainting. The silence was intense. I heard a bean roll off the table and fall to the floor with a click. It was as if the proverbial pin had dropped.
Rapidly and cleverly and logically, Gran'pa got into his stride.
Opening with a short history of our campaign in the Gorilla Country, he referred to the tremendous difficulties we had to overcome, the hardships we had to endure, and the diseases we had to face. With a motion in my direction, he stated that malaria had nearly carried me off (which was the first I had known of it!) and that the daily dangers of the jungle had brought every one of us within an ace of death, not once but scores of times.
He described the gorilla in lurid and blood-curdling details, drawing a little on his imagination here and there. He spoke of the enormous strength of the fully grown male; of its cunning, its cruelty and its vindictiveness. Allusion was also made to the baby gorilla which had so playfully torn Gran'pa's trousers, and to the grandmother gorilla which had come to its assistance in the forest.
The narration of these incidents greatly amused the audience, but in the midst of their chuckles Gran'pa suddenly pulled them up by pointing out that, at the time, it was no laughing matter. Leaning forward, with clenched fists resting on the table, he said, in a low voice:—
"Dressing up as a lady gorilla and luring amorous or curious males to their doom may sound very humorous in this room to-day; but out there, in a country where all animal life is engaged in a grim and earnest struggle for existence, Death—horrible and sudden—awaits the man who makes the least mistake."
Having been thus restored to a sense of reality, the old men were gradually given to understand that in the present backward state of science it was practically impossible to capture eighty odd live gorillas.
As Gran'pa approached nearer to the crux of the situation I could see that he was analyzing the psychology of his audience with all the cunning of a politician. He tactfully prepared the ground by stating that it would be a marvellous feat to obtain even half-a-dozen gorillas in the short time we had had at our disposal.