Page:Under the Sun.djvu/157

Rh rifle in the other; but on his face there was a strange, concerned expression, and in the tone of his voice an uneasy tremor, with which something in my own feelings sympathized.

“Is the master going to hunt the wild man?” asked the lad.

“The Soko? Yes, I want its skin,” I replied.

“But the wild man cried out, ‘''Ai! ma-ma''’ [‘Oh! mother, mother’] as it ran away, and — ”

“Here is the wild man’s stick,” broke in Mabruki, the Zanzibari; and as he spoke he held out towards me a long staff, seven feet in length. All the blood in nj body ran cold at the sight of it. It was a mere length of rattan, without ferule or knot, but at the upper end the bark had been torn down from joint to joint in parallel strips, to give the holder a firmer grip than one could have had on smooth cane, and just below the second joint the stumps of the corresponding shoots on two sides had been left sticking out for the hand to rest on.

How can I describe the throng of hideous thoughts that whirled through m}^ brain on the instant that I recognized these efforts of reason in the animal that I was now going to hunt to the death? But swift as were my thoughts, Mabruki had thought them out before me, and had come to a conclusion. “The mshenshi mtato [pagan ape] had stolen this stick from some village,” said he; “see,” and he pointed to the smoothed offshoots, “they have stained them with the mvule juice.”

The instant relief I felt at this happy solution of the dreadful mystery was expressed by me in a shout of joy; so sudden and so real that, without knowing why, my men shouted too, and with such a will that the