Stories from Everybody's Magazine Part 38

Suddenly the Colonel appeared, walking toward us, bent low. He had backed out o' his hiding-place behind a clump of scrub.

"He's laying down over there about a hundred yards away," he whispered. "Now we want to catch the start of the show. You boys ready?"

Means tightened his cinch, and shook his rope loose and coiled it up again. Loveless said he was ready. One of the saises produced the Colonel's horse from behind another clump of scrub, and Kearton dismounted and began creeping forward with his camera.

"Don't start him up till I get my position," he cautioned. "I'll wave my hand."

On account of the growth of low bushes, we could not see the rhino, but in silence we watched Kearton tiptoeing farther and farther ahead toward the spot where the Colonel had said the beast was lying down. The time was approximately a little after noon. The wind that was blowing was light, and same to us hot over the sunny reaches of veldt. The sky was cloudless.

Then the three ropers commenced maneuvering forward, swinging out a little to the right. Kearton stopped. He set up his camera and sighted it, and took out his handkerchief and carefully wiped the lens.

When Kearton waved his hand, the Colonel's yell shattered the stillness and the great beast heaved up out of the gra.s.s and tossed his head and sniffed the air and snorted. The hors.e.m.e.n rode full tilt at him, and with surprising quickness the rhino wheeled and broke away south down the valley.

For a good three miles the rhino ran straight and fast. Finally he came into more open country, which was dotted here and therewith small thorn trees. Here, also, in one place there was a fair-sized pool of water, left over from the rains of the night before. The rhino selected this pool as a good position from which to act on the defensive. He splashed into the water, stopped, and faced the hors.e.m.e.n.

Then followed a few minutes' respite for all concerned. The horses were panting heavily after the sharp run, and the rhino's position in the pool rendered it difficult to approach him for a chance to throw a rope. Evidently considering himself safe for the moment, the beast rolled once or twice in the water and then stood on guard as before, but with his black sides dripping.

"We've got to get him out of that," said the Colonel. "A horse wouldn't stand a show there. Now when I get him to charge me, you boys stand by."

Before the Colonel finished speaking, he was already edging toward the pool. For fifteen yards the rhino watched him coming.

Then with a great snort he charged out of the water, sending the white spray flying in every direction, and the Colonel had to ride hard to keep ahead of the tossing horn. But Means was after the rhino like a flash, and with a quick throw caught him round the neck. The big bay fell back on his haunches and the rope snapped like twine.

"We'll miss that heavy rope to-day," Means said.

"We'll tie him up with what we've got," the Colonel replied.

"Only we've got to tire him out some first. What we'll do is to make him charge us one after the other, so he'll run three times to the horses' running once."

It was a full half hour before the next attempt was made to throw a rope. Time after time the rhino came plunging out of the water to charge the nearest horseman. Our Western horses proved to be only just a trifle faster than the rhino, so that each time the beast nearly caught them. Besides, here and there, the ground was bad with ant-bear holes, which had to be avoided, for a fall would mean disaster. But little by little it became apparent that the rhino's continual charging was beginning to produce an effect.

In the meanwhile the rest of the chase was coming up. In the distance we could see them hurrying down the valley--hors.e.m.e.n and porters considerably scattered, as if each one followed a route of his own choosing Kearton led on his big chestnut. He was carrying the heavy camera under his arm, the tripod over his shoulder. The reins were hanging loose over his saddle horn, his heels were thumping the horse's sides, and the perspiration was streaming down his face.

"We lost you," he panted. "How's it going? What a picture!"

Mac, the Mohammedan, and Aro, the Masai warrior, took the apparatus from him, and he dismounted and went to work.

At the second attempt to rope the beast, Loveless caught him by one hind leg, and the rhino decided to shift his base of operations to an ant-hill in the neighboring clearing. His mode of progression was to walk on three legs and to drag the black horse after him with the other. He reached the ant-hill and demolished it and paused for a breathing spell.

The chase followed after, and Kearton went into action on the north and Gobbet on the south, near a small thorn tree, with a negro porter beside him. The rhino caught sight of Gobbet's camera and charged. The porter went up the tree like a flash.

Gobbet was bent over, looking through his view-finder, which, of course, gave him no idea of how fast the beast was bearing down on him nor how close he had already come.

"Look out!" yelled the Colonel.

Gobbet glanced up over the top of the camera and made a jump for the tree. But the porter was already in the branches, and the tree was so small there was not room for two, and Gobbet had to run for it. The next second, with a powerful upward stroke of his horn, the rhino sent the apparatus flying. Then Means succeeded in attracting his attention and he charged the horseman instead.

Gobbet picked up the debris, found that the tripod-head was split clean in two as with an axe, found the camera itself undamaged, found there was enough head left to support the camera, quickly mounted his machine again, and was just in time to catch the end of the rhino's chase after Means.

And all the while Kearton had his camera trained upon the scene in which his a.s.sistant was playing the conspicuous part.

"I hope I got that good," he said; "it'll make fine action--fine."

From one position to another, from ant-hill to thorn tree and back to ant-hill once more, the fight went on through the long, hot afternoon. Ropes were thrown and caught and broken, mended and thrown again. The horses were pulled, all standing, one way and another. Rolls of film were exposed and replaced by fresh ones. The rhino sulked and stormed and charged in turn.

At the end of the fourth hour Loveless had one short length of light line left. The rest of the ropes were dangling, broken, from the rhino's legs and neck as he stood at bay over the ruins of the ant-hill.

The sun was rapidly canting toward the west. The continual work in the intense heat, without food or water, was beginning to tell on both horses and men. The rhino was weakening faster. But only one hour of daylight remained, and if the beast could hold out till dark we should lose him.

There was the dead stump of a tree with the roots protruding lying in the gra.s.s near by. The Colonel told Means to fasten the stump to the last piece of line, and Loveless rode toward Kearton's machine, past the rhino, dragging the stump behind him.

As the Colonel had foreseen, the beast charged at the stump, and the loose ropes hanging from him became entangled in the roots.

So on they went at a run, first Loveless, then the stump, bounding over the ground, then the charging rhino, headed straight for Kearton's camera. The Masai warrior stood by the tripod with his long spear poised high, and Kearton turned the handle and shouted at Loveless:

"How many times have I got to tell you not to come straight into the lens? Bring him on at an angle! . . . I don't want to be unreasonable," he added, when the rhino stopped, "but you ought to have learned better by this time."

Then, by hauling in gently, Loveless succeeded in recovering two of the ropes, and they were pieced together and thrown again, catching the rhino by one hind leg. Both the cowboys put their horses to work pulling forward on the rope, and they lifted that one hind leg ahead. The tired beast shifted his great body after it, and thus step by step the horses dragged him up to a tree, where Loveless pa.s.sed the end of the rope two turns around the bole and made it fast.

The rhino charged once just before the knot was tied, and Loveless had to jump into the branches through the thorns to escape. He charged again, rather feebly this time, trying to get free, but the rope held well and tripped him up. After that he stood quietly at the end of his tether, watching the camera in a sullen way while Kearton took his picture with the last few feet of film.

By this time the light was almost gone, the films were finished, horses and men were nearly done, and, besides, it was moving day and high time we resumed the march.

In the November number Mr. Scull will relate the adventures of the Buffalo Jones African Expedition in La.s.soing Lion.

Vol. XXIII No. 5 NOVEMBER, 1910

The Homely Heroine {pages 602-608}

By EDNA FERBER

MILLIE WHITCOMB, of the fancy goods and notions, beckoned me with her finger. I had been standing at Kate O'Malley's counter, pretending to admire her new basket-weave suitings; but in reality reveling in her droll account of how, in the train coming up from Chicago, Mrs. Judge Porterfield had worn the negro porter's coat over her chilly shoulders in mistake for her husband's. Kate O'Malley can tell a funny story in a way to make the after-dinner pleasantries of a Washington diplomat sound like the clumsy jests told around the village grocery stove.

"I wanted to tell you that I read that last story of yours," said Millie, sociably, when I had strolled over to her counter, "and I liked it, all but the heroine. She had an 'adorable throat' and hair that 'waved away from her white brow,' and eyes that 'now were blue and now gray.' Say, why don't you write a story about an ugly girl?"

"My land!" protested I. "It's bad enough trying to make them accept my stories as it is. That last heroine was a raving beauty, but she came back eleven times before the editor of Blakely's succ.u.mbed to her charms."

Millie's fingers were busy straightening the contents of a tray of combs and imitation jet barrettes. Millie's fingers were not intended for that task. They are slender, tapering fingers, pink-tipped and sensitive.

"I should think," mused she, rubbing a cloudy piece of jet with a bit of soft cloth, "that they'd welcome a homely one with relief.

These G.o.ddesses are so cloying."

Millie Whitcomb's black hair is touched with soft mists of gray, and she wears lavender shirtwaists and white stocks edged with lavender. There is a Colonial air about her that has nothing to do with celluloid combs and imitation jet barrettes. It breathes of dim old rooms, rich with the tones of mahogany and old bra.s.s, and Millie in the midst of it, gray-gowned, a soft white fichu crossed upon her breast.

In our town the clerks are not the pert and gum-chewing young persons that story-writers are wont to describe. The girls at Bascom's are inst.i.tutions. They know us all by our first names, and our lives are as an open book to them. Kate O'Malley, who has been at Bascom's for so many years that she is rumored to have stock in the company, may be said to govern the fashions of our town. She is wont to say, when we express a fancy for gray as the color of our new spring suit:

"Oh, now, Nellie, don't get gray again. You had it year before last, and don't you think it was just the least leetle bit trying? Let me show you that green that came in yesterday. I said the minute I clapped my eyes on it that it was just the color for you, with your brown hair and all."

And we end by deciding on the green.