“No, sir!” cried all the boys at once.
“We have come so far around the world on purpose to see something of life in Africa,” exclaimed Eugene. “It was in our minds when we started, and we have abandoned other plans we have laid in order that we might carry out this part of our programme. It would be a pretty thing now if we should be frightened away by a few negroes and Dutchmen.”
“Hear! hear!” cried the rest of the Club.
“All right. We’ll go on,” said Uncle Dick.
And they did go on. They reached Grahamstown early the next morning, and McGregor (the boys had become familiar enough with him by this time to call him “Mack”) struck a bargain with the English colonel’s agent in less than an hour after he got ashore. The outfit he purchased comprised everything our travellers could possibly need during their journey except provisions, merchandise, and ammunition. It comprised a good many things, too, for which they did not think they should find any use, and some which they thought were entirely unnecessary, such as camp-stools, easy-chairs, mattresses, and a carpet to cover the floor of the tent in which the colonel and his companions had lived like princes. The boys laughed when they saw these things, and told one another that no one but a very wealthy man could be a hunter if English notions were carried out. They had spent months on the prairie with no more luggage than they could carry on their backs, and they had lived well, too, and enjoyed themselves.
“The colonel ought to have had just one more thing, and then he would have been very comfortably fixed,” said Archie; “that is a bath-tub.”
“Just look here!” cried Frank, as he drew one of the double-barrelled rifles from its holster. “There’s no one in our party who can use this weapon. It was made for a giant.”
It was an elephant gun, the first the boys had ever seen, and it was a great curiosity to them. It was so heavy that when Frank raised it to his shoulders and glanced along the barrels, it required the outlay of all his strength to hold it steady. His little Maynard, which weighed just eight pounds and was warranted to throw a ball a thousand yards, would have looked like a pop-gun beside it.
The guns were not the only things in their new outfit that the boys found to wonder at. The wagon, and the oxen that were to draw it during a four or five months’ journey, if they should be fortunate enough to escape the lions so long, demanded a good share of their attention. The wagon was a huge, clumsy-looking affair—the largest thing the boys had ever seen mounted on wheels. It was eighteen feet long, four feet wide, and looked heavy enough to tax the strength of the oxen even when there was nothing in it. It was provided with a cover, like the wagon in which Frank and his cousin made their first journey across the plains, but it was not made of canvas. It was made of green boughs fastened together with strips of rawhide. It was furnished with two water-tanks, four boxes in which to carry tools and clothing, and there was still space enough left in the body of the wagon to accommodate an ample supply of provisions, and also a good-sized cargo of merchandise.
The oxen that were to draw this unwieldy vehicle were tall, gaunt, wiry-looking beasts, with wide-spreading horns. They reminded the cousins of the half-wild cattle they had seen in their uncle’s ranche in California.