"I don't know," I answered. "If I didn't, he's only got three cartridges left!"
We left the Greek's body in the tree for Schillingschen to shoot at further if he saw fit; it was safer there from marauding animals than if we had laid it on the ground, and as for the rites of the dead, it was a toss-up which was better, kites and vultures, or jackals and the ants. We saw no sense that night in laboring with a knife and our hands to bury a body that the brutes would dig up again within five minutes of our leaving it.
"Schillingschen has three cartridges,"' sad Will. "One each for you, me and Fred Oakes! I'll stay and trick him some more. I'll think up a new plan. I don't care if he gets me. I'd hate to face Fred without my rifle, and have to tell him the enemy is laying for him with it through my carelessness."
It was my first experience of Will with hysteria, for it amounted to that. I remembered that to cure a bevy of school-girls of it one should rap out something sharply, with a cane if need be. Yet Will was not like a school-girl, and his hysteria took the pseudo-manly form of refusal to retreat. I yearned for Fred's camp-fires, and Fred's laugh, hot supper, or breakfast, or whatever the meal would be, and blankets. Will, with a ruthless murderer stalking him in the dark, yearned only for self-contentment. All at once I saw the thing to do, and thrust my rifle in his hands.
"Take it," I said. "Hunt Schillingschen all night if you want to. I'm going back to tell Fred I've lost my rifle, and was afraid to face you for fear you'd laugh at me. Go on—take it! No, you've got to take it!"
I let the rifle fall at his feet, and he was forced to pick it up. By that time I was on my way, and he had to hurry if he hoped to catch me. I kept him hurrying—cursing, and calling out to wait. And so, hours later, we arrived in sight of Fred's fires and answered his cheery challenge:
"Halt there, or I'll shoot your bally head off!"
Lions had kept him busy making the boys pile thornwood on the fires. He had shot two—one inside the enclosure, where the brute had jumped in a vain effort to reach the frantic donkeys. We stumbled over the carcass of the other as we made our way toward the gate-gap, and dragged it in ignominiously by the tail (not such an easy task as the uninitiated might imagine).
Once within the enclosure I left Will to tell Fred his story as best suited him, Fred roaring with laughter as he watched Will's rueful face, yet turning suddenly on Brown to curse him like a criminal for laughing, too!
"Go and fetch that Mauser of yours, Brown, and give it to Mr. Yerkes in place of what he's lost! Hurry, please!"