Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 2 (1925-02).djvu/50



IFE in the West African bush can be either wildly exciting or deadly monotonous. Jim Chisholm had complained to his friend Hodgins the first night he arrived down in Duala from his lonely bush station in northern Nigeria that his tour had been the latter.

"Not even a damned uprising. Natives all as peaceful as lambs," he grumbled, "so I thought I'd get in a little shooting before I went home and trekked down here. I've heard so many of your wonderful yarns about this being the finest hunting ground in the world."

He grinned over at his host, who was noted for his yarning.

"Have any luck?" Hodgins asked.

Chisholm puffed away at his cigarette for a moment and stared moodily out into the depths of the African night but did not answer for some time.

"I had a rather exciting trip," he began at length, with a wry little smile, "but I didn't get a shot. To tell the truth, I had an idea I was being hunted myself."

"What do you mean?"

Hodgins pulled himself up sharply from the depths of his camp chair and looked curiously over at his guest.

"Well, as I told you, I started down country with the intention of doing some hunting. I had the usual string of carriers and my boy Adamou (you remember him, don't you?), but say! we had no sooner crossed the French border into the Cameroons than the fun commenced. The first night we camped at Nsanakang, in an old native hut just along the Tie Tie Bridge—you know the old spot where we met the Huns in 1916. Just as I was turning in for the night a native suddenly came slinking in out of the darkness, naked as the day he was born and carrying a note, wedged in a cleft stick, proper native style. He squatted down on the floor while I took and read it. It was a warning, telling me to turn back and not attempt to cross the Cameroons, and was signed with—what do you think?—the Leopard's claw, roughly sketched in blood!"

Hodgins whistled in dismay.

"Got the Leopard Society on your trail, eh?"

Chisholm nodded.

"So I concluded. The note was written in good English, native clerk style, but when I demanded to know from the carrier who had sent him he pretended not to know English.