LORD AND MAN
Blake turned about and swung away up the ravine. Lord James followed in the half-obliterated path, which led along the edge of a tiny spring rill. The cleft was here closed in on each side with sheer walls of rock from twenty to thirty feet high. At the point where this small box canon intersected the middle of the cliff ridge, the gigantic baobab that Lord James had seen from the steamer, towered skyward, its huge trunk filling a good third of the width of the gorge. Across from it and nearer at hand was a thicket of bamboos, around which the spring rill trickled from a natural basin in the rock.
But the visitor gave scant heed to the natural features of the place. His glance passed from a great antelope hide, drying on a frame, to the bamboo racks on which sun-seared strips of flesh were curing over a smudge fire. Looking to his left, he saw a hut hardly larger than a dog kennel but ingeniously thatched with bamboo leaves. Then his glance was caught and held by a curious contrivance of interwoven thorn branches and creepers, fitted into a high narrow opening in the trunk of the baobab.
"What's that?—hollow tree?" he asked.
"Yes," answered Blake, without turning. "Sixteen-foot room inside. That's where the she-leopard and the cubs were smothered. Fired the gully to drive out the family. All stayed at home and got smothered 'cept old Mr. Leopard. He ran the gantlet. Lord, how he squalled, poor brute! But they'd have eaten us if we hadn't eaten them. He landed in the pool, too scorched to see. Settled him with my club."
"Clubbed him?—a leopard! I say now! A bit different, that, to snipe shooting."
"Well, yes, a trifle different, Jeems—a trifle," conceded Blake.
"My word! What haven't you been through!" burst out the Englishman.
"And to think she, too, went through it all—six weeks of it!"
"That's it!" enthused Blake. "She's the truest, grittiest little girl the sun ever had the good luck to shine on! If she thinks now I can't realize—that I'm not going to do the square thing by her! I've been thinking it all over, Jimmy. I've got it all mapped out what I'm going to do. Wait, though!"
He sprang ahead and pulled at the thorny contrivance that stopped the opening in the baobab trunk. It was balanced midway up, on a crossbar. Almost at a touch, the lower part swung up and outward and the upper half down and inward. He stepped in under it, hesitated a moment, and went on into the hollow, with an exclamation of relief: "No, 't isn't her room any more, thank God!"