BILL 335 
told him to follow it, not thinking for a moment that 
he would be able to hold it in the maze of herd tracks. 
On our last visit to town he had invested in a stiff 
brim straw hat and a cane, and he looked like any- 
thing but an elephant tracker as he walked jauntily 
along with his straw hat on the back of his head and 
swinging his cane like a dandy. For five hours he 
followed that trail with the utmost nonchalance, in 
places where it would have given the professional 
tracker the greatest trouble and where nine out of 
ten would have lost it. At last, as it led us through 
a dense bush, Bill suddenly stopped and held up his 
cane as a signal for caution; as I drew up to him there 
were two old bulls not twenty feet from us. When 
one of them was dead and the other gone | felt much 
more comfortable than when I first realized the situa- 
tion into which we had blundered. 
But the time that Bill earned our everlasting grati- 
tude and immunity from punishment for present 
misdeeds was when I was smashed up by the elephant 
on Mt. Kenia. He was with Mrs. Akeley at the base 
camp when the news reached her at dusk, and it was 
past midnight when she was ready to come to me 
through that awful twenty miles of forest and jungle 
in the blackness of a drenching rain. While headman 
and askaris were helpless, stupidly sharing the fear and 
dread of the forest at night which paralyzed the port- 
ers and guides, it was Bill with a big stick who put 
them in motion and literally drove them ahead of 
Mrs. Akeley tome. And then it was he who directed 
the cutting of the road out of the forest for the pas- 
