"Oh, that's all nonsense!" said Oscar. "Mack, you are about twenty years behind the times. That old superstition was exploded long ago."
"I know a good many experienced hunters who will tell you that the belief that a honey-bird will lead one who is foolish enough to follow him to a snake or a sleeping lion is not a superstition, but a reality," was McCann's reply. "I am well enough acquainted with them to know that they are treacherous. Years ago I used to work for two transport-riders, brothers, of the name of Baker. One day the younger one took a fool notion into his head that he wanted some honey, and although his brother tried hard to make him stay by the wagon, he wouldn't do it. He followed one of those birds up a gloomy, thickly wooded ravine and never came back. The bird led him to a lion, and the beast killed him. He would doubtless have made a meal of him that night if we had not found the body and taken it away."
"It was little you had to do with taking it away, I'll warrant," said Oscar to himself. "That story may be true, and then again it may be, like a good many others you have told me, manufactured out of the whole cloth. Saddle up a couple of the horses—Little Gray and another."
"You'll be sorry for it," said McCann as he slowly, almost painfully, arose from the ground.
Up to this time he had been lively enough, but now, when he saw a prospect of work before him, and dangerous work, too, all the symptoms of the fever with which he had been threatened, the day before came back to him again. His step was slow and feeble, and he moved as though he could scarcely keep his feet.
"I don't know whether I can sit in a saddle or not," said he as he crawled out from under the wagon.
"I didn't ask you to try, did I?" said Oscar, who could not make up his mind whether he ought to laugh or get angry. "I shall take Thompson with me."
This was just what McCann wanted, and yet Oscar's words enraged him. He had found, greatly to his surprise, that his employer's success did not depend upon him; that his feigned illness made no sort of difference with Oscar's hunting; that the Kaffir was quite capable of taking his place as after-rider—and all these things galled him.
A conceited person always feels hurt when he awakes to the fact that the world and the people in it can get on about as well without him as they can with him.