He bent his wise brows on the assembly.
“I will tell you a tale,” he said. “It happened many years ago in Senegal. I was quartered in a remote station, and to pass the time used to go fishing for big barbel in the river. A little Arab mare used to carry my luncheon basket—one of the salted dun breed you got at Timbuctoo in the old days. Well, one morning I had good sport, and the mare was unaccountably restless. I could hear her whinnying and squealing and stamping her feet, and I kept soothing her with my voice while my mind was intent on fish. I could see her all the time, as I thought, out of a corner of my eye, tethered to a tree twenty yards away. After a couple of hours I began to think of food. I collected my fish in a tarpaulin bag, and moved down the stream towards the mare, trolling my line. When I got up to her I flung the tarpaulin on her back—”
He paused and looked round.
“It was the smell that gave me warning. I turned my head and found myself looking at a lion three feet off.... An old man-eater, that was the terror of the village.... What was left of the mare, a mass of blood and bones and hide, was behind him.”
“What happened?” I asked. I was enough of a hunter to know a true yarn when I heard it.
“I stuffed my fishing-rod into his jaws, and I had a pistol. Also my servants came presently with rifles. But he left his mark on me.” He held up a hand which lacked three fingers.
“Consider,” he said. “The mare had been dead more than an hour, and the brute had been patiently watching me ever since. I never saw the kill, for I was accustomed to the mare’s fretting, and I never marked her absence, for my consciousness of her was only of something tawny, and the lion filled that part. If I could blunder thus, gentlemen, in a land where men’s senses are keen, why should we busy preoccupied urban folk not err also?”
Sir Walter nodded. No one was ready to gainsay him.
“But I don’t see,” went on Winstanley. “Their object was to get these dispositions without our knowing it. Now it only required one of us to mention to Alloa our meeting tonight for the whole fraud to be exposed.”
Sir Walter laughed dryly. “The selection of Alloa shows their acumen. Which of us was likely to speak to him about tonight? Or was he likely to open the subject?”