“Something might attack you!”
“You said that lions and panthers do not hunt their prey in the daytime. Besides, do you hear how King is trumpeting because he is lonesome for us? What lion would dare to hunt where King’s voice is heard?”
And she began to coax and in fact to be quite insistent on going.
“No, Stasch, I shall go alone. Remember, I am grown up!”
Stasch at first hesitated, but in the end let her have her own way. The camp and the smoke of the campfire could be distinctly seen, and King, who was lonesome without Nell, trumpeted continually. As Nell had said, there was no fear of getting lost in the low grass, and as far as lions, panthers, and hyenas were concerned, they need not be taken into consideration, for these beasts hunt their prey only at night. Besides, he knew he could do nothing to please the girl more than to show her that he no longer considered her a child.
“Well, all right,” he said; “go alone, but walk straight ahead and do not stop on the way.”
“But may I pick these flowers myself?” she asked, pointing to a bush of kousso,[[33]] which was covered with a heavy mass of pink flowers.
“Yes, you may!”
With these words he turned around, and after taking the precaution of showing her the group of trees from which the smoke issued and from which King’s trumpeting was heard, he disappeared into the high jungle at the edge of the ravine.
He had taken scarcely a hundred steps when he felt exceedingly anxious. “It was very stupid of me,” he thought, “to let Nell go alone in the heart of Africa—how foolish, foolish! She is still a child! I should not have left her side even for an instant unless King had been with her. Who knows what may happen? Who knows whether there is not a snake under that pinkish shrubbery, or large monkeys might come from this narrow pass and carry her off or bite her. Heaven help me! I have done a most foolish thing!”