"Better grab the opportunity while we have it, he said.
"Look at the horses," said Means.
The Colonel walked deliberately along the platform to where the horses were tethered among the trees, and stood there watching them for quite a while.
"You're right, Means," he said, when he returned to us. "They'll need at least four or five days before we can put them at a lion—well, we've got to chance it."
The next five days were the longest in the history of the expedition. The Colonel, Means, and Ulyate remained at Kijabe with the outfit. The rest of us traveled down the line to Nairobi to procure more porters, more horse-feed, and more supplies; and every day we watched the weather closely and speculated on the probabilities of how long the lions would see fit to remain in the district. The time was so short that all other plans had been abandoned to take advantage of this one opportunity—the expedition was plunging, so to speak, on this final chance to succeed. But the weather held clear, and in the meanwhile the preparations for this last attempt were pushed with the utmost speed.
The hunters at Nairobi, together with the storekeepers and farmers of the vicinity, had heard of the capture of the rhino. On occasions some of them spoke of it to us. They explained that they had thought all along that we could undoubtedly rope a rhino.
"But you haven't got a lion yet, have you?" they said.
On April 5 the preparations were nearly completed and Loveless's foot was nearly well. So we started up the line to rejoin the outfit, leaving Gobbet at Nairobi to finish developing the films. We could not afford to spend more time in preparation. At Kijabe we found the horses thoroughly rested and Means's back much improved. He had refused to see a doctor, asserting that his back would just naturally get better of its own accord. He said he was ready to start.
With one exception the dogs were in good condition—old John from Arizona with his scars of many battles, Rastus and The Rake, taken from a pack of English fox-hounds, and Simba, the terrier, and the collie clipped like a lion, from the London pound. Sounder, the American bloodhound, still showed some effects of distemper. But none of the dogs was to be left behind on this journey.
That night the ox-wagons were loaded—one with provisions and camp baggage, the other with drums of water—and when the dawn first began to break over the top of the range the expedition set forth from the station. The crater on Longernot had already caught the first rays of the sun when we reached the bottom of the hill and started across the flat land of the valley.