fence,
fell, tearing up the ground and squealing like a pig.

"Good," said Berselius.

Adams wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He had
never gone through a moment of more deadly nerve tension.

He was moving toward his quarry, now stretched stiff and stark, when he
was arrested by Felix.

"Cow," said Felix again.

The cow had broken cover at the report of the gun and had got their wind.

Just as two automatic figures of the same make will, when wound up, and
touched off, perform the same actions, the cow did exactly what the bull
had done--ran about in a fierce and distressed manner and then charged
right in the eye of the wind.

"Mine," said Berselius, and he went forward twenty paces to meet her.

Berselius, chilling and aloof to the point of mysteriousness, had, since
the very starting of the expedition, shown little of his true character to
his companion. What he had shown up to this had not lowered Adams's
respect for him.

Self-restraint seemed the mainspring of that commanding force which this
strange man exercised. His reprimand to the porters for the loss of the
boy, expressed in a few quiet words, had sent them shivering to their
places, cowed and dumb. Animal instinct seemed to tell them of a terrible
animal which the self-restraint of that quiet-looking little man, with the
pointed beard, alone prevented from breaking upon them.

Berselius had allowed the bull to approach to a little over a hundred
yards before letting Adams fire. He had gauged the American's nerve to a
nicety and his power of self-restraint, and he knew that beyond the
hundred-yard limit he dared not trust them; for no man born of woman who
has not had a good experience of big game can stand up to a charging
rhinoceros and take certain aim when the hundred-yard limit has been
passed.

The thunderous drumming of the oncoming brute echoed from the forest. Had
its head been a feather-pillow the impact of the three tons of solid flesh
moving behind it would have been certain death; but the head was an
instrument of destruction, devised when the megatherium walked the world,
and the long raking horn would have ripped up an elephant as easily as a
sharp penknife rips up a rabbit.

Before this thing, and to the right of it, rifle in hand, stood Berselius.
He did not even lift the gun to his shoulder till the hundred-yard limit
was passed, and then he hung on his aim so horribly that Adams felt the
sweat-dr