“And did you land it up safe?” I asked.

“Well no,” said Quatermain, “we lost about a third of it in crossing a river.  A flood came down suddenly just as the men were crossing and many of them had to throw down their tusks to save their lives.  We had no means of dragging it up, and so we were obliged to leave it, which was very sad.  However, we sold what remained for nearly seven thousand pounds, so we did not do so badly.  I don’t mean that I got seven thousand pounds out of it, because, you see, I insisted upon Every taking a half share.  Poor fellow, he had earned it, if ever a man did.  He set up a store in the old colony on the proceeds and did uncommonly well.”

“And what did you do with the lion trap?” asked Sir Henry.

“Oh, I brought that away with me also, and when I reached Durban I put it in my house.  But really I could not bear to sit opposite to it at nights as I smoked.  Visions of that poor woman and the hand of her dead child would rise up in my mind, and also of all the horrors of which it had been the instrument.  I began to dream at last that it held me by the leg.  This was too much for my nerves, so I just packed it up and shipped it to its maker in England, whose name was stamped upon the steel, sending him a letter at the same time to tell him to what purpose the infernal machine had been put.  I believe that he gave it to some museum or other.”

“And what became of the tusks of the three bulls which you shot!  You must have left them at Nala’s kraal, I suppose.”

The old gentleman’s face fell at this question.

“Ah,” he said, “that is a very sad story.  Nala promised to send them with my goods to my agent at Delagoa, and so he did.  But the men who brought them were unarmed, and, as it happened, they fell in with a slave caravan under the command of a half-bred Portuguese, who seized the tusks, and what is worse, swore that he had shot them.  I paid him out afterwards, however,” he added with a smile of satisfaction, “but it did not give me back my tusks, which no doubt have been turned into hair brushes long ago;” and he sighed.

“Well,” said Good, “that is a capital yarn of yours, Quatermain, but——­”

“But what?” he asked sharply, foreseeing a draw.

“But I don’t think that it was so good as mine about the ibex—­it hasn’t the same finish.”

Mr. Quatermain made no reply.  Good was beneath it.

“Do you know, gentlemen,” he said, “it is half-past two in the morning, and if we are going to shoot the big wood to-morrow we ought to leave here at nine-thirty sharp.”

“Oh, if you shoot for a hundred years you will never beat the record of those three woodcocks,” I said.

“Or of those three elephants,” added Sir Henry.

And then we all went to bed, and I dreamed that I had married Maiwa, and was much afraid of that attractive but determined lady.