“Can’t! Randal’s poisoned foot has me tied up here.”
After the journalist had gone, Randal spoke to his partner gloomily. “Damn bad luck his going on the same trek with Mrs Stannard. She’s just rottenly unhappy enough not to care what she does, and he’s just the fellow women throw their bonnets over the mill for.”
“Why, he is as ugly as Halifax!” exclaimed Hallam.
“That makes nix. He’s got brains behind that lovely complexion, and women like brains.”
“More likely that insolent, don’t-care-a-tinker’s-curse air of his that gets ’em,” mused the American.
“He doesn’t care a tinker’s curse either. He’d walk over anybody to get his own way. He threw down the editorship of the biggest paper at the Cape because he wouldn’t take orders from the owners, and the same thing up at Salisbury. He hadn’t run the Journal a month before he bust up with Max the proprietor. Refused to air Max’s politics because they weren’t his own, and went off and fought the niggers instead. Now he’s got another big job in Johannesburg. Everybody wants him till they get him. There’s no doubt he can put it all over every other journalist in South Africa.”
Later, the subject of this monograph returned to the shop with a demand for .303 cartridges, and the announcement that he had got Johnson, a horse, and some boys. Remained only to get the lion, and he seemed cocksure of that.
His parting injunction to Randal was to have his box of provisions put on McKinnon’s waggon if the convoy passed through before he got back, and to send out a messenger to let him know where the waggons were so that he could go straight after them without returning to Umtali.
As it happened, he did not get back, and the waggons passed through that night whilst he and Johnson were lying behind a roughly constructed scherm between the Penhalonga hills. Smokeless, drinkless, oppressed by a deep and nameless silence, ears straining and guns at the cock, they were in a state of discomfort only to be suffered in the quest for glory. But the lion came at the pitch-black hour of two, and his doom was dight.
They breakfasted in the grey dawn, and while the boys skinned the trophy, Johnson, who besides being a bank manager, was a gossip and something of a wit, regaled the journalist with amusing biographies of the Umtali residents. Incidentally the Stannards came before the board, and Bettington learned, among other things, that the ex-army man had been running a farm out beyond the Police Camp, that the farm was a failure, and all his wife’s money had gone in it, likewise the money of his sister-in-law; that the latter was very pretty, and Randal and Hallam only two of a dozen men who were in love with her; but that she would have none of them, preferring to devote all her time to the business of minding the Stannard baby and keeping the peace in the Stannard household. In fact, there was very little about this unpropitious ménage that Bettington did not learn, and the more he heard the more he felicitated himself upon the fact that with the oxen and veld in the state they were it would take ten good days to reach Beira. Those ten days looked good to him. Next to shooting, and fighting, and writing, he held that life had nothing more piquant to offer than the society of a pretty, disillusioned married woman. It was not so much because he was a scoundrel that he preferred them married, as because he knew himself fonder of adventure and travel and a careless life than he could ever be of a wife. Wherefore he had long ago decided that marriage was not for him. It did not follow, according to his code, that flirtation was not for him; only that he must eschew the society of pretty girls and devote himself to the pretty women who were safely tied up. Certainly, even in this there was a risk of finding himself laid by the heels for life; but it was less of a risk than flirtation with girls entailed.