“‘Do these elephants sleep?’ I whispered to the astonished Gobo.

“‘Yes, Macumazahn, they sleep.’

“‘Nay, Gobo, they are dead.’

“‘Dead?  How can they be dead?  Who killed them?’

“‘What do people call me, Gobo?’

“‘They call you Macumazahn.’

“‘And what does Macumazahn mean?’

“’It means the man who keeps his eyes open, the man who gets up in the night.’

“’Yes, Gobo, and I am that man.  Look, you idle, lazy cowards; while you slept last night I rose, and alone I hunted those great elephants, and slew them by the moonlight.  To each of them I gave one bullet and only one, and it fell dead.  Look,’ and I advanced into the glade, ’here is my spoor, and here is the spoor of the great bull charging after me, and there is the tree that I took refuge behind; see, the elephant shattered it in his charge.  Oh, you cowards, you who would give up the chase while the blood spoor steamed beneath your nostrils, see what I did single-handed while you slept, and be ashamed.’

“‘Ou!’ said the men, ‘ou! Koos!  Koos y umcool!’ (Chief, great Chief!) And then they held their tongues, and going up to the three dead beasts, gazed upon them in silence.

“But after that those men looked upon me with awe as being almost more than mortal.  No mere man, they said, could have slain those three elephants alone in the night-time.  I never had any further trouble with them.  I believe that if I had told them to jump over a precipice and that they would take no harm, they would have believed me.

“Well, I went up and examined the bulls.  Such tusks as they had I never saw and never shall see again.  It took us all day to cut them out; and when they reached Delagoa Bay, as they did ultimately, though not in my keeping, the single tusk of the big bull scaled one hundred and sixty pounds, and the four other tusks averaged ninety-nine and a half pounds—­a most wonderful, indeed an almost unprecedented, lot of ivory.[*] Unfortunately I was forced to saw the big tusk in two, otherwise we could not have carried it.”

     [*] The largest elephant tusk of which the Editor has any
     certain knowledge scaled one hundred and fifty pounds.

“Oh, Quatermain, you barbarian!” I broke in here, “the idea of spoiling such a tusk!  Why, I would have kept it whole if I had been obliged to drag it myself.”

“Oh yes, young man,” he answered, “it is all very well for you to talk like that, but if you had found yourself in the position which it was my privilege to occupy a few hours afterwards, it is my belief that you would have thrown the tusks away altogether and taken to your heels.”

“Oh,” said Good, “so that isn’t the end of the yarn?  A very good yarn, Quatermain, by the way—­I couldn’t have made up a better one myself.”

The old gentleman looked at Good severely, for it irritated him to be chaffed about his stories.