THE COLONEL KILLS THREE ELEPHANTS 153 
hunter and has killed numbers of lions and ele¬ 
phants, but now he says he is through with danger¬ 
ous game. 
“I’ve had enough of it,” he says. 
The colonel, Tarlton, Heller, and Kermit were 
the only members of the expedition present, 
Mearns and Loring having been engaged in a sep¬ 
arate mission up in the Kenia country for several 
weeks, while Cuninghame had gone to Uganda to 
make preparations for the future operations of the 
party in that country. 
Mrs. Akeley washed up in the colonel’s tent, 
while Stephenson and I used Kermit’s tent, and 
as we washed and scrubbed away the memories of 
the elephant carcasses the colonel stood in the door 
and talked to us. 
We told him that each of us had taken a drink 
of Scotch whisky the evening before in honor of 
the elephants—the first drinks we had taken for 
weeks. 
“I’d do the same,” said the colonel, “but I don’t 
like Scotch whisky. As a matter of fact, I have 
taken only three drinks of brandy since I’ve been 
in Africa, twice when I was exhausted and once 
when I was feeling a little feverish. Before I left 
Washington there were lots of people saying that I 
was a drunkard, and that I could never do any 
work until I had emptied a bottle or two of liquor.” 
We told him that we had heard these rumors fre¬ 
quently during the closing months of his admin¬ 
istration, and he laughed. 
