“I was beginning to get excited now, for, as you fellows know, there is nothing in experience to warm up your nerves like a lion at close quarters, unless it is a wounded buffalo; and I got still more so when I made out through the smoke that the lions were all moving about on the extreme edge of the reeds.  Occasionally they would pop their heads out like rabbits from a burrow, and then, catching sight of me standing about fifty yards out, draw them back again.  I knew that it must be getting pretty warm behind them, and that they could not keep the game up for long; and I was not mistaken, for suddenly all four of them broke cover together, the old black-maned lion leading by a few yards.  I never saw a more splendid sight in all my hunting experience than those four lions bounding across the veldt, overshadowed by the dense pall of smoke and backed by the fiery furnace of the burning reeds.

“I reckoned that they would pass, on their road to the bushy kloof, within about five and twenty yards of me; so, taking a long breath, I got my gun well on to the lion’s shoulder—­the black-maned one—­so as to allow for an inch or two of motion, and catch him through the heart.  I was on, dead on, and my finger was just beginning to tighten on the trigger, when suddenly I went blind—­a bit of reed-ash had drifted into my right eye.  I danced and rubbed, and succeeded in clearing it more or less just in time to see the tail of the last lion vanishing round the bushes up the kloof.

“If ever a man was mad I was that man.  It was too bad; and such a shot in the open, too!  However, I was not going to be beaten, so I just turned and marched for the kloof.  Tom, the driver, begged and implored me not to go; but though as a general rule I never pretend to be very brave (which I am not), I was determined that I would either kill those lions or they should kill me.  So I told Tom that he need not come unless he liked, but I was going; and being a plucky fellow, a Swazi by birth, he shrugged his shoulders, muttered that I was mad or bewitched, and followed doggedly in my tracks.

“We soon got to the kloof, which was about three hundred yards in length and but sparsely wooded, and then the real fun began.  There might be a lion behind every bush—­there certainly were four lions somewhere; the delicate question was, where.  I peeped and poked and looked in every possible direction, with my heart in my mouth, and was at last rewarded by catching a glimpse of something yellow moving behind a bush.  At the same moment, from another bush opposite me out burst one of the cubs and galloped back toward the burned-out pan.  I whipped round and let drive a snap-shot that tipped him head over heels, breaking his back within two inches of the root of the tail, and there he lay helpless but glaring.  Tom afterward killed him with his assegai.  I opened the breech of the gun and hurriedly pulled out the old case, which, to judge from what ensued, must,