SAFARI HUNTERS 149 
The red-haired man was Leslie J. Tarlton. No 
description of British East Africa is complete without 
some reference to Tarlton, the Boer War veteran 
now known to hunters the world over because of the 
flourishing business he has built up in Nairobi—a 
part of which is equipping safari hunters with every- 
thing from food to niggers. 
Tarlton and his partner, Newland, were Austra- 
lians who had served in the Boer War. At its close 
they set out to make their fortunes somewhere in 
Africa. Coming to Nairobi with none too much of 
this world’s goods but plenty of ambition and en- 
thusiasm, they were casting about for an objective 
when on that morning in 1905 I stumbled upon Tarl- 
ton’s iron house. The safari business into which 
they fell that day helped to make them prosperous 
men until the opening of the World War in 1914 put 
an end to African hunting for a time. 
Tarlton afterward confessed to me that the type- 
writer that first attracted my attention would not 
write at all. Its only use was to make a noise when 
a prospective client came in sight. It was perhaps 
the first propounder in Nairobi of the modern busi- 
ness principle that nothing succeeds like success and 
it propounded no less diligently because Tarlton had 
not yet discovered what his post-war profession was 
to be. Two or three weeks after our first meeting, 
when I came in from the plains, my safari laden with 
collections to be packed in brine, Tarlton was much 
on the job, observing the process and assisting when- 
ever he saw an opportunity. Finally he asked why 
