e feared the lion than it feared the four men on the river bank
above. An hour passed before at last the river water plashed under the
trampling hoofs.

Hillyard threw his rifle forward, but the shikari touched him on the
arm.

"They are going," he whispered, and again the four men waited, until the
shikari raised his hand.

"It will be good for us to move! They are very near." He looked towards
the east, but there was no sign yet of the dawn.

"We will go very cautiously into the forest. We shall not know where
they are, but they will know everything we are doing."

In single file they moved from the bank amongst the mimosas, the donkey
with his head covered, still led by the boy. Under the cavern of the
branches it was black as pitch--so black that Hillyard did not see the
hand which the shikari quietly laid upon his shoulder.

"Listen."

On his left a branch snapped, ahead of them a bush that had been bent
aside swished back on its release.

"They are moving with us. They are all round us," the shikari whispered.
"They know everything we do. Let us wait here. When the morning breaks
they will charge or they will go."

So once again the little party came to a halt. Hillyard stood listening
and wondering if the morning would ever come; and even in that time of
tension the habit of his mind reasserted its sway. This long, silent
waiting for the dawn in the depths of an African forest with death at
his very elbow--here was another sharp event of life in vivid contrast
with all the others which had gone before. The years in London, the
letter-box opposite the Abbey where he had posted his manuscripts at
three in the morning and bought a cup of coffee at the stall by the
kerb--times so very close to him--the terms at Oxford, the strange
hungry days on the quays of Spain, the moonlit wanderings on the
footpath over the rustic ridge and up the hill, when he composed poems
to the moon and pithy short, great thoughts--here was something fresh to
add to them if he didn't go down at daybreak under the hoofs of the
herd! Here was yet a further token, that out of the vicissitudes of his
life something more, something new, something altogether different and
unimagined was to come, as the crown and ultimate reason of all that had
gone before. Once more the shikari's hand touched him and pointed
eastwards. The tree-trunks were emerging from the darkness. Beyond them
the black cup of the sky was thinning to translucency. Ve