A roar of agony and shouts of consternation told me, even before I was released from the tentacles of the thorn bush, that some one else had got in the way of the charge that I had declined to meet; then the noise of the pursuit passed on and died out beyond the "gate." My pigskin puttees were about the only things I had on that did not remain, wholly or in part, in the embrace of the thorns, but my own scratches were quickly forgotten at the sight of the other victim of the charge. There were two other victims, in fact—one a dog that had been raked by a soft-nosed bullet from my pistol, and the other the stout-hearted old gladiator, Tebu, who, leaping to take up the challenge I had side-stepped, had fallen afoul of the boar itself. His bulldog courage—or the toddy—had impelled him to undertake on short notice the job the Beretani had shirked, and, with no chance to locate the vital spot for his thrust, had lunged wildly and taken the consequences.
The dog was dead, and it looked for a while as though Tebu, with a foot-long gash across his thigh and bleeding like one of the pigs that lay beside him, would follow suit. It transpired presently, however, that no arteries were severed; so after staunching the flow as effectually as possible with a torniquet and bandages that left several members of the party nearly in a state of nature after giving up their pareos for the wherewithal, they rigged up a rough litter of boughs and lianas and set off, not untenderly, to bear the wounded warrior back to Taio-haie. There, thanks to the skilful and kind care of the sisters at the Mission, he was soon on his way to recovery.
A month later, in Tahiti, I received a letter from Cramer, the German trader of Taio-haie. After going on to tell how our friend McGrath had been blown away in his cutter during a hurricane and was given up for lost, he wrote:
"I saw Tebu today. He is still very lame, and probably always will be, but he has been going out every day since he left the mission hospital to hunt the big boar that cut him up so the time he was out with you. He says he is going to keep on hunting it until he kills the boar or the boar kills him."
To this letter was added a postscript, written several days later, which read:
"Tebu brought in the big boar last night. He says he knows it by the cut he gave it on the shoulder. As we found no bullet marks on the body we have thought he is probably mistaken."
To this I replied:
"Probably Tebu is right. I cannot swear that I was looking down the sights of my pistol when I fired those shots."