“I don’t much like bringing them in here,” Verna said. “There’s tsetse at times. But it has turned so much cooler that I think it’s safe.”
They were riding in single file, she leading. It was a wonderful road. Tall trees shutting out the light; ropes of monkey trailers dangling to the ground, thick undergrowth and long grass making that peculiar translucent hue such as you may see by taking a deep dive into a tropical sea. Not many bird voices, but here and there one, for birds prefer the outskirts of inhabited lands, and the remotest depths of forest are not to their taste.
“Shall we lunch here, Verna?” said Denham, as they came out upon a small open space where a runnel of water flowed into a pool. In the course of their close companionship he had got into the way of calling her by her name. It had come naturally to both of them somehow. She, for her part, had, of late, never called him anything at all.
“Yes; it’s as good a place as any, and, I’ll tell you now, it’s where the record head was shot. I never would bring you here before, you know, but—here we are.”
And she flashed a merry laugh at him.
“By Jove! that’s capital. Now we’ll ‘reconstitute’ the whole performance, as the French police do in a murder case. Now, show me. Where was the koodoo, and where were you?”
“First of all, about the horses,” she said; “we must keep them hitched up, we can’t knee-halter them because it’s swampy the other side of the vlei, and once they got into that, why—good-night. We should have to walk home and break the news as gently as we could to father.”
They loosened the girths only, having first allowed the animals to drink; and then Verna, in as few words as possible, showed him the positions of the whole affair.
“It’s nothing to brag about,” she ended up. “I’ll own to one bit of conceit about it, though. I told father that it seemed a thousand pities my name shouldn’t figure as having shot the record koodoo head of the world, even if it was only in a private collection. He said that it could—however, we’ve settled all that now.”
“Well, he was wrong, for, on second thoughts, it can’t.”