there the very embodiment of self-possession, devil-may-care-ishness, even masterful dominance. It did not fit in, somehow, with that scene in the falling dusk, by the frozen mere at Courtland, on Christmas Eve.
“But,” he persisted, “do you really and seriously mean, Lamont, that if these chaps were to break out to-night they would cut all our throats?”
“Really and seriously, Ancram. But didn’t I tell you that the great god Chance was a ruling factor up here? You’ll soon tumble to his little ways. Here—try some of this Magaliesburg,” pushing a large two-pound bag towards him.
“Er—thanks. I think I’ll stick to my mixture. The fellows at Pagadi gave me some of that the other night, and I didn’t care for it.”
“Oh, that’ll pass. You’ll soon not look at anything else,” chipped in Peters briskly, filling his own pipe. He had sized up the new-comer as being very raw, very green. But then he had seen plenty such before. Suddenly he sat bolt upright, listening intently.
“D’you hear that, Lamont?” he said eagerly.
“Yes,” was the answer, after a moment of careful listening.
“Why—what—what is it?” broke in Ancram, and there was a note of scare in his voice. In the light of their previous conversation it must be at least the Matabele war-cry, he decided.
“There it is again,” said Peters. “Did you hear?”
“Yes,” answered Lamont. “You may be in luck’s way yet, Ancram, and get a shot at a lion. They are over there, in the Ramabana Forest, though whether they’ll be there still to-morrow is another thing. Let’s get outside and listen.”
Ancram, to be candid with himself, would much rather have remained inside. He had an idea that a lion might pounce upon him the moment he set foot in the darkness outside.
In the soft velvet of the black sky a myriad of stars hung. So near did they seem that the flash of flaming planets was even as the burning of distant worlds. The ghostly stretch of veldt around was wrapped in darkness and mystery, and from afar, just audible on the waft of stillness, came a succession of hollow, coughing roars.
“Don’t send up your hopes too high, Ancram,” said Lamont, emitting quick puffs from his pipe. “You may not get a show at them after all. Lions are very sporadic. Here to-night, fifty miles off to-morrow morning.”
Ancram devoutly hoped these might be five hundred miles off, as he answered—
“Ah yes. That’s the beastly bore of it. I’d like to have had a shot at them, I must say.”
“Oh, we’ll fix you up with that, sooner or later, sonny, never fear,” said Peters cheerfully. “If not to-morrow, later on we’ll worry up a trip, and it’ll be hard if we don’t turn you out a big ’un.”
Then a friendly wrangle ensued between Lamont and Peters as to whether wild animals, and especially lions, would come into houses after anything. Lamont declared they wouldn’t, and Peters cited instances where they had, not at first hand however; and at length by the time the guest was told off to his makeshift couch in the living-room, he was so worked up to the terrors of this strange wild land, to which he had been fool enough to come, that he spent half the night wondering whether the outer door would for a moment resist the furious rush of a famished beast, or whether the window was of sufficient width to admit such.
Whereby it is manifest that Lamont and the other had taken in the stranger in more ways than one.
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