“Cow,” said Félix again.
The cow had broken cover at the report of the gun and had got their wind.
Just as two automatic figures of the same make will, when wound up, and touched off, perform the same actions, the cow did exactly what the bull had done—ran about in a fierce and distressed manner and then charged right in the eye of the wind.
“Mine,” said Berselius, and he went forward twenty paces to meet her.
Berselius, chilling and aloof to the point of mysteriousness, had, since the very starting of the expedition, shown little of his true character to his companion. What he had shown up to this had not lowered Adams’s respect for him.
Self-restraint seemed the mainspring of that commanding force which this strange man exercised. His reprimand to the porters for the loss of the boy, expressed in a few quiet words, had sent them shivering to their places, cowed and dumb. Animal instinct seemed to tell them of a terrible animal which the self-restraint of that quiet-looking little man, with the pointed beard, alone prevented from breaking upon them.
Berselius had allowed the bull to approach to a little over a hundred yards before letting Adams fire. He had gauged the American’s nerve to a nicety and his power of self-restraint, and he knew that beyond the hundred-yard limit he dared not trust them; for no man born of woman who has not had a good experience of big game can stand up to a charging rhinoceros and take certain aim when the hundred-yard limit has been passed.
The thunderous drumming of the oncoming brute echoed from the forest. Had its head been a feather-pillow the impact of the three tons of solid flesh moving behind it would have been certain death; but the head was an instrument of destruction, devised when the megatherium walked the world, and the long raking horn would have ripped up an elephant as easily as a sharp penknife rips up a rabbit.
Before this thing, and to the right of it, rifle in hand, stood Berselius. He did not even lift the gun to his shoulder till the hundred-yard limit was passed, and then he hung on his aim so horribly that Adams felt the sweat-drops running on his face like ants, and even Félix swallowed like a man who is trying to choke down something nauseous. It was a magnificent exhibition of daring and self-restraint and cool assurance.
At twenty-five yards or a little under, the cordite rang out. The brute seemed to trip, just as the other had done, over some invisible taut-stretched wire, and skidding with its own impetus, squealing, striking out and tearing up the grass, it came right up to Berselius’s feet before stiffening in death. Like the great automaton it was, it had scented the human beings just as the bull had scented them, “fussed” just as he had fussed, charged as he had charged, and died as he had died.