In the midst of his dance he kicked something and stumbled.  He stopped dead when he saw what that something was.  It was the queer, mud-plastered object which he had compared with the broken rifle, and the sight of it recalled him to his wits.  He tucked it hastily beneath his jacket, and looked about him for his horse.  The horse was standing behind him some distance away, and nearer to the cliff.  Norris snatched up his own rifle, and ran towards it.  His hand was on the horse’s mane, when just above its head he noticed a clean patch of granite, and across that space he saw a huge grey baboon leap, and then another, and another.  He turned about, and looked across to the opposite wall, straining his eyes, and a second later to the wall on his right.  Then he understood; the twisted rifle, the finger marks, this thing which he held under his coat, he understood them all.  The walls of the hollow were alive with baboons, and the baboons were making along the cliffs for the entrance.

Norris sprang on to his horse, and kicked and beat it into a gallop.  He had only to traverse the length of a diameter, he told himself, the baboons the circumference of a circle.  He had covered three-quarters of the distance when he heard a grunt, and from a bush fifty yards ahead the buffalo sprang out and came charging down at him.

Norris gave one scream of terror, and with that his nerves steadied themselves.  He knew that it was no use firing at the front of a buffalo’s head when the beast was charging.  He pulled a rein and swerved to the left; the bull made a corresponding turn.  A moment afterwards Norris swerved back into his former course, and shot just past the bull’s flanks.  He made no attempt to shoot them; he held his rifle ready in his hands, and looked forwards.  When he was fifty yards from the passage he saw the first baboon perched upon a shoulder of rock above the entrance.  He lifted his rifle, and fired at a venture.  He saw the brute’s arms wave in the air, and heard a dull thud on the ground behind him as he drove through the gully and out on to the open veld.

The next morning Norris broke up his camp, and started homewards for Johannesburg.  He went down to the Stock Exchange on the day of his arrival, and chanced upon Teddy Isaacs.

“What’s that?” asked Isaacs, touching a bulge of his coat.

“That?” replied Norris, unfastening the buttons.  “I told you I would bring back Barrington if I found him,” and he trundled a scoured and polished skull across the floor of the Stock Exchange.

HATTERAS.

The story was told to us by James Walker in the cabin of a seven-ton cutter one night when we lay anchored in Helford river.  It was towards the end of September; during this last week the air had grown chilly with the dusk, and the sea when it lost the sun took on a leaden and a dreary look.  There was no other boat in the wooded creek and the swish of the tide against the planks had a very lonesome sound.  All the circumstances I think provoked Walker to tell the story but most of all the lonely swish of the tide against the planks.  For it is the story of a man’s loneliness and the strange ways into which loneliness misled him.  However, let the story speak for itself.