cleaning and slip it down to the track Jim remarked 

 irrelevantly that tigers were ' schelms,' and it was 

 his conviction that there were a great many in the 

 kloofs round about. At intervals during the next 

 hour or so he dropped other scraps about tigers and 

 their ways, and how to get at them and what good 

 sport it was, winding up with a short account of how 

 two seasons back an English ' Capitaine ' had been 

 killed by one only a few miles away. 



Jim was no diplomatist : he had tiger on the brain, 

 and showed it ; so when I asked him bluntly what the 

 old man had been talking about, the whole story 

 came out. There was a tiger it was of course the 

 biggest ever seen which had been preying on the 

 old chief's kraal for the last six months : dogs, goats 

 and kaffir sheep innumerable had disappeared, even 

 fowls were not despised ; and only two days ago the 

 climax had been reached when, in the cool of the 

 afternoon and in defiance of the yelling herdboy, 

 it had slipped into the herd at the drinking-place 

 and carried off a calf a heifer-calf too ! The old 

 man was poor : the tiger had nearly ruined him ; 

 and he had come up to see if we, "who were great 

 hunters," would come down and kill the thief, or 

 at least lend him a tiger-trap, as he could not afford 

 to buy one. 



In the evening when we returned to camp we found 

 the old fellow there, and heard the story told with the 

 same patient resignation or stoical indifference with 

 which he had told it to the boys ; and, if there was 

 something inscrutable in the smoky eyes that might 

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