The click seemed louder than he thought it would and he listened in suspense. No sound.
Yes, this was the rifle with which he would... Casting one more cautious look from the window, he shouldered the weapon and hurried quietly down the stairs.
“What time did my mother say she’d be back?” he called.
“Not till dinnertime, Master Connover.” He crossed the road, and headed through the woods toward the river. Once in the woods, the spirit of freedom took possession of him and he indulged in the luxury of shooting the gun at nothing at all.
“‘I am a scout,’” he said, “‘and can handle a hundred savages!’”
Whereas, in plain fact, he couldn’t have been much farther from being a scout.
Arrested by a flutter in one of the trees, he leveled his gun again and by the luck of a random shot, brought down a robin. The sight of its quivering body and loose-hanging neck as it lay at his feet almost frightened him for he had never killed a red-blooded creature before, and he felt now a sense of heavy guilt. He was afraid to pick the robin up and when he finally did so and saw how wilted and drooping the thing was and how aimlessly the head swung he was seized with a little panic of fear and dropped it suddenly.
But it was absolutely necessary that he should carry out his program of encountering the Zulu’s. As long as he was not really going to kill anyone it was all right. He was at least going to have the thrill of that experience. Now that he had killed the robin, he found that in actual practice he preferred a sort of modified Dan Dreadnought to the real one; and he could piece out with his imagination the more harrowing features of Captain Dauntless’s book.
So he pictured a dugout drawn up on the shore of the river which he was approaching; and he pictured a group of howling Zulus on the farther shore. He heard ikes and the splashing of water, and it fitted well with his heroic scheme to imagine these sounds were made by the howling Zulus, though in reality he knew, or thought he knew, that they came from farther up the river near the scouts’ camp.
He was within a few yards of the river now and pushing through the thick growth which bordered it.