“Nkose! It is good, impela!” and he drained it at two gulps.
“The worst of it is,” went on Verna, “the record pair of koodoo horns can’t be ticketed with my name. Because this is a poach, you know.”
“Oh, but it can—and shall. Denham has undertaken to indemnify me in any risks I run in procuring him specimens. This’ll stand us in for a hundred pounds at least. Why, the horns are a record! And I shall stick out that he placards on them a notice, that they were shot by you—shot fair and clean, by God! as I’ve never seen anything better shot.”
“All right, dear,” answered the girl. “Then some fine day the record leaks out that we have been shooting koodoo on a Government game preserve without a permit. What then?”
“What then? Why, I’m fined—say a hundred pounds. Denham makes that good, and—makes good the other hundred for the horns. But the chances are a thousand to one against the news ever reaching the proper quarter over here, for all purposes of prosecution, I mean. You see, it doesn’t specify where the thing was shot.”
“No; there’s something in that,” said Verna. “But I’d like to figure, if only in a rich man’s private museum, as having shot the record koodoo in the world.” And she laughed merrily.
The Zulus were busy cutting up the great antelope, which task they accomplished in a surprisingly short space of time, chattering and laughing among themselves as they devoured various portions of the tid-bits raw. In process of the talk Undhlawafa contrived to say something to Ben Halse—something “dark.” That worthy nodded.
“Stay here, Verna. I shall be back directly,” he said.
She looked at him for a moment full in the moonlight. Some instinct was upon her. Once before, the same instinct had moved her to intervene in a certain transaction of his, to intervene right at the critical moment, with the result of saving him from a disastrous fate as the outcome of what that transaction would have involved. The thing had hung in the balance; but her instinct had rung true, her intervention had availed. He had been saved. Now that same instinct was upon her again. She could not for the life of her have defined its meaning, still—there it was.
“I’ll be back directly,” he went on. Then he and Undhlawafa disappeared within the black shades of the forest.