“Speaking of lions,” began Yarner.
He was right, of course; I HAD spoken of lions.
“—I shall never forget,” he went on (of course, I knew he never would), “a rather bad scrape I got into in the up-country of Uganda. Imagine yourself in a wild, rolling country covered here and there with kwas along the sides of the nullahs.”
I did so.
“Well,” continued Yarner, “we were sitting in our tent one hot night—too hot to sleep—when all at once we heard, not ten feet in front of us, the most terrific roar that ever came from the throat of a lion.”
As he said this Yarner paused to take a gulp of bubbling whiskey and soda and looked at me so ferociously that I actually shivered.
Then quite suddenly his manner cooled down in the strangest way, and his voice changed to a commonplace tone as he said,—
“Perhaps I ought to explain that we hadn’t come up to the up-country looking for big game. In fact, we had been down in the down country with no idea of going higher than Mombasa. Indeed, our going even to Mombasa itself was more or less an afterthought. Our first plan was to strike across from Aden to Singapore. But our second plan was to strike direct from Colombo to Karuchi—”
“And what was your THIRD plan?” I asked.
“Our third plan,” said Yarner deliberately, feeling that the talk was now getting really interesting, “let me see, our third plan was to cut across from Socotra to Tananarivo.”