“Stop a bit, Jeffries,” he said.  “You see that pollard about one hundred and forty yards off?  Well, there should be another woodcock down in a line with it, about sixty paces out in the field.”

“Well, if that bean’t the very smartest bit of shooting,” murmured Jeffries, and departed.

After that we went home, and in due course Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good arrived for dinner, the latter arrayed in the tightest and most ornamental dress-suit I ever saw.  I remember that the waistcoat was adorned with five pink coral buttons.

It was a very pleasant dinner.  Old Quatermain was in an excellent humour; induced, I think, by the recollection of his triumph over the doubting Jeffries.  Good, too, was full of anecdotes.  He told us a most miraculous story of how he once went shooting ibex in Kashmir.  These ibex, according to Good, he stalked early and late for four entire days.  At last on the morning of the fifth day he succeeded in getting within range of the flock, which consisted of a magnificent old ram with horns so long that I am afraid to mention their measure, and five or six females.  Good crawled upon his stomach, painfully taking shelter behind rocks, till he was within two hundred yards; then he drew a fine bead upon the old ram.  At this moment, however, a diversion occurred.  Some wandering native of the hills appeared upon a distant mountain top.  The females turned, and rushing over a rock vanished from Good’s ken.  But the old ram took a bolder course.  In front of him stretched a mighty crevasse at least thirty feet in width.  He went at it with a bound.  Whilst he was in mid-air Good fired, and killed him dead.  The ram turned a complete somersault in space, and fell in such fashion that his horns hooked themselves upon a big projection of the opposite cliffs.  There he hung, till Good, after a long and painful detour, gracefully dropped a lasso over him and fished him up.

This moving tale of wild adventure was received with undeserved incredulity.

“Well,” said Good, “if you fellows won’t believe my story when I tell it—­a perfectly true story mind—­perhaps one of you will give us a better; I’m not particular if it is true or not.”  And he lapsed into a dignified silence.

“Now, Quatermain,” I said, “don’t let Good beat you, let us hear how you killed those elephants you were talking about this evening just after you shot the woodcocks.”

“Well,” said Quatermain, dryly, and with something like a twinkle in his brown eyes, “it is very hard fortune for a man to have to follow on Good’s ‘spoor.’  Indeed if it were not for that running giraffe which, as you will remember, Curtis, we saw Good bowl over with a Martini rifle at three hundred yards, I should almost have said that this was an impossible tale.”

Here Good looked up with an air of indignant innocence.

“However,” he went on, rising and lighting his pipe, “if you fellows like, I will spin you a yarn.  I was telling one of you the other night about those three lions and how the lioness finished my unfortunate ‘voorlooper,’ Jim-Jim, the boy whom we buried in the bread-bag.