"I wish he could raise my dead horse," I said; and I described to Jack my own escape.
"Great scissors!" cried Jack. And for some little time such foolish and unmeaning expressions as "Cæsar!" "Snakes alive!" "Scissors!" and so on were the only remarks I could get my friend to make.
"I don't know which was the bigger fool," he said at last, "your horse that wouldn't go or mine that wouldn't stay. This fool of a beast of mine took me half a mile away before he would consent to return, and I only got a look in at the hunt then thanks to old M here, who kindly brought the elephant to me as I was not allowed to go to the elephant."
"Still," I said, "I think your horse was less of a fool than mine under the circumstances. It's no fault of my poor brute that I was not made jam of by that raging beast. By the bye, I suppose you killed it between you, as you are here and the elephant is not?"
"He's dead," said Jack. "You made two good holes in him, but in the wrong place. M'ngulu brought him by me, and I put in a lovely bull's-eye in the forehead. He went down like a sheep, but struggled upon his knees again. Then I put in a second near the same spot, and M fired off his piece and nearly knocked my cap off—he never went near the elephant. He is a free cannonader, is M; I don't think we'll give him rifles to hold in future, Peter—at least, not loaded ones."
We were now at the scene of the bad elephant's demise, and Jack showed me where he had stood, and where M'ngulu, and how it had all happened. M's bullet had really passed very close to Jack's head, it appeared, for the tree trunk was splintered by it a foot or two above the spot where Jack had been standing.
There lay the "bad 'un," terrible even in death; a big, vicious, mangy, bony, ungainly elephant as ever went mad and was expelled by a respectable herd. His tusks had been good, but they were spoiled by his first fall, and though we collected the pieces, and M deftly dug out the roots, they were useless as specimens. We made them over to M, however, who sold them, I daresay, for a good price.
After this we shot two or three other elephants before returning southwards; but in each case it being we who hunted them and not they us, as in the instance of the "bad 'un," the record of our achievements would be uninteresting in comparison, and I shall leave the tale of them to the imagination of my readers, who know well enough how the thing is done, and resume the thread of our history proper, which must be pursued without further digressions; and those who have skipped the hunting adventures may now read on in the certainty that the Treasure business will in future be strictly "attended to," and that they will not be called upon to skip again, unless, indeed, it be from pure excitement in the incidents of the legitimate story of the hidden money.
Had we known it, we were on the brink, even now, of a very terrible incident indeed.
CHAPTER XXIII