As soon as he realised the intentions of Mr Rogers, he became most earnest in his endeavours to get the party well on their way farther and farther into the wilds, making the eyes of the boys dilate as he told them in fair English of the herds of antelope and other game he would soon show them in the plains; the giraffes, buffaloes, elephants, and, above all, the lions, whose haunts he knew, and to which he promised to take them.
Whenever the father began to talk in this strain his two sons grew excited, and started to perform hunting dances, in which the number of imaginary lions and buffaloes they slew was something enormous. Every now and then, too, the boys killed some imaginary elephant, out of whose unwieldy head they made believe to hack the tusks, which they invariably brought and laid at their young masters’ feet, grunting the while with the exertion.
Dick soon grew tired of it however.
“It’s all very well,” he said; “but if that is the way we are to load the waggons with ivory, we shall be a long time getting enough to pay the expenses of the journey.”
Mr Rogers joined them one day as they were walking along in advance of the slow-moving waggon, and began to question the Zulu about the game in the wilds north of where they were; and in his broken English he gave so glowing an account that his hearers began to doubt its truth.
He said that when he had had to flee from his own people for his life, he had at first gone right away into the hunting country, and stayed there for a year, finding out, in his wanderings, places where hunting and shooting people had never been. Here, he declared, the wild creatures had taken refuge as in a sanctuary; and he declared that he should take the boss who had been so kind to his boys, and both the young bosses, to a wild place where they would find game in abundance, and where the forests held the great rhinoceros, plenty of elephants, and amongst whose open glades the tall giraffe browse the leafage of the high trees. There in the plains were herds of buffalo too numerous to count, quagga, zebra, gnu, eland, and bok of all kinds. There was a great river there, he said, full of fish, and with great crocodiles ready to seize upon the unwary. The hippopotamus was there too, big and massive, ready to upset boats or to attack all he could see.
Mr Rogers watched his sons attentively as the Zulu narrated his experience of the land, and he was delighted to see how much Dick was already leaving off his dull languid ways, and taking an interest in what was projected. One thing the father wished to arrive at, and that was whether Dick would be frightened through his weakness, and the hunting parties consequently do him more harm than good. But just then a question put by his son showed him that he was as eager as his brother for an encounter with the wild creatures of the forest and plains.
“And do you say there are lions?” said Dick.
“Yes, plenty lion,” said the Zulu. “They come to camp at night, and try to get the ox and horse.”
“Oomph! oomph! oomph!” growled Coffee, in an admirable imitation of the lion’s roar.