58 IN THE INDIAN JUNGLE. 



and told the Sahibs' servants, and we went back 

 with a lot of people, and found that the mass the 

 elephant had been crushing under its feet was the 

 bodies of the two officers ! The brute must have 

 caught them when they were thrown to the ground 

 and killed them with a blow of its trunk or a 

 crush of the foot, and it had then mangled the 

 two bodies together. We got a cart and brought 

 the bodies away." 



Simple in all its ghastly details, the tale was 

 enough to make one's blood run cold, but heard 

 as it was, said one present, " within a few yards 

 of what that bundle of native blankets contained, 

 it steeled one's heart for revenge." But let us 

 leave this painful narrative and hasten on to 

 the time when the monster met with his deserts 

 at the hand of one of the finest sportsmen that 

 ever lived, and that too in a manner which 

 makes every Britisher feel a pride in his race 

 that can produce such men. 



Gordon Gumming was a noted shikari, almost as 

 famous in his way as his brother, the celebrated 

 lion-slayer of South Africa, and his equally famous 

 sister, the talented artist and explorer of Maori 

 fastnesses in New Zealand. Standing over six feet 

 in his stockings and of proportionate breadth of 

 shoulder, he was an athlete in every sense of 

 the word. With his heavy double rifle over his 

 shoulder, and with Yalloo, his native tracker and 

 shikari at his heels, he would think nothing of a 

 twenty-mile swelter after a wounded bison even 

 in the hottest weather. An unerring shot, he was 





