frankness that compels even a newspaper man to regard
as being confidential. Our _safari_ was the only one he had met in the
field since he had been in Africa, and it was evident that the efforts
of the protectorate officials to save him from interference and
intrusion had been successful.

Arrangements were then made for an elephant hunt. Colonel Roosevelt was
working on schedule time, and had planned to be in Sergoi on the
seventeenth. He agreed to a hunt that should cover the fifteenth,
sixteenth, and possibly the seventeenth, trusting that they might be
successful in this period and that a hard forced march could get him to
Sergoi on the night of the eighteenth.

It was arranged that he and Mr. Akeley, with Kermit and Tarlton and one
tent should start early the next morning on the hunt, trusting to luck
in overtaking the herd that he had seen in the morning. The hunt was
enormously successful, and the adventures they had were so interesting
that they deserve a separate chapter.

CHAPTER IX

THE COLONEL READS MACAULAY'S "ESSAYS," DISCOURSES ON MANY SUBJECTS WITH
GREAT FRANKNESS, DECLINES A DRINK OF SCOTCH WHISKY, AND KILLS THREE
ELEPHANTS

On the afternoon of November fourteenth, a little cavalcade of horsemen
might have been seen riding slowly away from our camp on the Nzoia
River. One of them, evidently the leader, was a well-built man of about
fifty-one years, tanned by many months of African hunting and wearing a
pair of large spectacles. His teeth flashed in the warm sunlight. A
rough hunting shirt encased his well-knit body and a pair of rougher
trousers, reinforced with leather knee caps and jointly sustained by
suspenders and a belt, fitted in loose folds around his stocky legs. On
his head was a big sun helmet, and around his waist, less generous in
amplitude than formerly, was a partly filled belt of Winchester
cartridges. His horse was a stout little Abyssinian shooting pony, gray
of color and lean in build, and in the blood-stained saddle-bag was a
well-worn copy of Macaulay's _Essays_, bound in pigskin. Our hero--for
it was he--was none other than Bwana Tumbo, the hunter-naturalist,
exponent of the strenuous life, and ex-president of the United States.

[Drawing: _Improving Each Shining Hour_]

If I were writing a thrilling story of adventure that is the way this
story would begin. But as this is designed to be a simple chronicle of
events, it is just as well at once to get down to basic