12 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



missariat as best they could wherever they happened to be; 

 often they depended upon one day's victory to furnish the 

 ammunition with which to wage the morrow's battle; and 

 ever they had to be on guard no less against the thousands 

 of cannibals in their own ranks than against the thousands 

 of cannibals in the hostile ranks, for, on whichever side 

 they fought, after every battle the warriors of the man-eating 

 tribes watched their chance to butcher the wounded indis- 

 criminately and to feast on the bodies of the slain. 



The most thrilling book of true lion stories ever written 

 is Colonel Patterson's "The Man-eaters of Tsavo." Colonel 

 Patterson was one of the engineers engaged, some ten or 

 twelve years back, in building the Uganda Railway; he 

 was in charge of the work, at a place called Tsavo, when it 

 was brought to a complete halt by the ravages of a couple 

 of man-eating lions which, after many adventures, he finally 

 killed. At the dinner at the Mombasa Club I met one of 

 the actors in a blood-curdling tragedy which Colonel Patter- 

 son relates. He was a German, and, in company with an 

 Italian friend, he went down in the special car of one of the 

 English railroad officials to try to kill a man-eating lion 

 which had carried away several people from a station on the 

 line. They put the car on a siding; as it was hot the door 

 was left open, and the Englishman sat by the open window 

 to watch for the lion, while the Italian finally lay down on 

 the floor and the German got into an upper bunk. Evi- 

 dently the Englishman must have fallen asleep, and the 

 lion, seeing him through the window, entered the carriage 

 by the door to get at him. The Italian waked to find the 

 lion standing on him with its hind feet, while its fore paws 

 were on the seat as it killed the unfortunate Englishman, 

 and the German, my informant, hearing the disturbance, 

 leaped out of his bunk actually onto the back of the lion. 

 The man-eater, however, was occupied only with his prey; 

 holding the body in his mouth he forced his way out through 

 the window- sash, and made his meal undisturbed but a 

 couple of hundred yards from the railway carriage. 



