Page 135 - Adventure Magazine, 1921, July 18th

Adventure
130
see Tembo once, taking a line of his own, if, some two hour s before dawn, in that
swing aside wilhout a pause as a six-fool darkest hour of the twenty -four when all
green and deadly ma~ba s'.1ake, sure_ly un- the world seems dead or sinking into death,
seen in the gloom, c01le~ 1L~clf hasti ly l~p tha t precise devil 'who lives in violent tooth-
into the foliage from wluch 1t had l1t.~ng ~n ache had not prompt ed th e one-tusked bun
his course. And al o when, all followmg m to seek a sacrifice. , He did, and, th e mar-
line along a path trodden, a beaten high- velous scenting-power that live_s in the
road, by the game through the bush f~r trunks of all elephant s guiding him, he
countless centuries, every elephant as 1t calmly pulled down one of the elevated
came to a certain spot, without pausing for lookout huts of th e native watchmen.
a single instant in their ~mo?th._ shuilling, The yell that announced the arrival oi
swift walk, swung out of line m silence and the suddenly awakened woolly one, sliding
making a detour, rejoined the game-pat h head-first upon the back of the one-tu sked
farther on. reprobate below, was the first that super-
It looked like batt le-ships in "line ahead" giant Tembo knew of tD.e affair; but it was
swinging out to let by a sailing vessel. And not the last.
I can swear that, even if it had been broad Those grain and vegetable fields awoke.
daylight, .you or I would have walked Th e native village back of them awoke and
straight into the deep, horribly spiked, con- all the echoes back behind the village in the
cealed pitfall which every elephant had de- forest and the forested hills, they were
tected in the dark night bang in the middle awakened too.
of the path. This last was the work of na- Apparently every man and woman and
tives. piccaninny in those parts who did not pos-
sess a wooden drum possessed a horn.
MIDNIGHT found the herd halted Many had torches. Some kicked dying
on the forest's edge, grouped about :fires into volumes of sparks and all pos-
in little parties, silent as the tomb, sessed voices-very lusty voices. The din
invisible almost as the ghosts themselves suddenly awakened by that one terrified
tha t haunt the. tomb. Before them human yell was remarkable, and the illu-
stretched the fields and gardens, shambas minations quite A-1.
of a big native village hard by. These 1 The one-tusked ruffia:a, now joined by an
represented a season's harvest, food against absolutely tuskless bull of evil repute, ob-
famine-all the crops of the village. Here je~ted to the :fires, as elephants often will,
and there in the shambas, perched like pig- and trampled them out and scattered their
eon-cotes aloft, stood little huts on posts for owners among the embers and flying sparks.
the shelter of the watchmen who guarded But Tembo, weighted with awful respon-
the crops by night and who were naturally sibility that goes with three hundred pounds
asleep. of ivory, did no such crazy thing. After
Half an hour the herd spent in taking ob- forty seconds of fan-eared, stark, stat-
servations. Then, led by Tembo now-who uesque rigidity at the :first alarm, he-well,
by silent consent had instantly taken com- he was not there. He faded back into the
mand-the herd moved out and fed, and moon-haze that gave him birth. He re-
the feeding of fifty and one elephants among ceded like a dissolving view. He evapo-
crops is no small matter. A typhoon in rated spirit-fashion and without a sound.
that place would almost have been cheaper. And all the herd except the berserk de-
But nothing could have been less typhoon- tusked pair of hooligans went with him.
like than this disaster in the making; the Forty and nine elephants gone--in a
giants of the forest feed almost as unob- brcalh! Only the debacle they had cre-
trusively as rats, and twice .D,S carefully. ated remained in th ir tra k · nothing, not
Indeed, except for the steady calling of a even the dark could hide that.
nightjar, the caustic comments of a few
monkeys and the subdued, sleepy chatter DAWN - cool, calm, clean and piti-
of a disturbed guinea.Jowl or two, the sham- less- revealed the elephant herd, or
bas appeared to be possessed of moonlight revealed the backs of the elephant
and inky shade alone and of nothing els . herd, still going in single file, still silent as
The herd, in fact, might have fed their spooks, through dense thickets of barnbo ,
. feed and departed silently as they had come · and tawny grass jungle.