In the soft velvet of the black sky a myriad of stars hung. So near did they seem that the flash of flaming planets was even as the burning of distant worlds. The ghostly stretch of veldt around was wrapped in darkness and mystery, and from afar, just audible on the waft of stillness, came a succession of hollow, coughing roars.
“Don’t send up your hopes too high, Ancram,” said Lamont, emitting quick puffs from his pipe. “You may not get a show at them after all. Lions are very sporadic. Here to-night, fifty miles off to-morrow morning.”
Ancram devoutly hoped these might be five hundred miles off, as he answered—
“Ah yes. That’s the beastly bore of it. I’d like to have had a shot at them, I must say.”
“Oh, we’ll fix you up with that, sooner or later, sonny, never fear,” said Peters cheerfully. “If not to-morrow, later on we’ll worry up a trip, and it’ll be hard if we don’t turn you out a big ’un.”
Then a friendly wrangle ensued between Lamont and Peters as to whether wild animals, and especially lions, would come into houses after anything. Lamont declared they wouldn’t, and Peters cited instances where they had, not at first hand however; and at length by the time the guest was told off to his makeshift couch in the living-room, he was so worked up to the terrors of this strange wild land, to which he had been fool enough to come, that he spent half the night wondering whether the outer door would for a moment resist the furious rush of a famished beast, or whether the window was of sufficient width to admit such.
Whereby it is manifest that Lamont and the other had taken in the stranger in more ways than one.