“Well, major, what are your orders for the day?” asked Tom Brown one fine morning after breakfast, while they were enjoying their usual pipe under the shade of a large umbrageous tree.

 

“You’d better try the river that we have just come to,” said the major.

 

“Do you think me amphibious, that you should always assign me that work?” asked Tom.

 

“Not exactly, Tom, but I know you are fond of telling fibs, and perhaps the amphibious animals may afford you some scope in that way. At all events they are capable of such astonishing feats that if you merely relate the truth about them you will be sure to get credit in England for telling fibs—like poor Mungo Park, who was laughed at all his life for a notorious drawer of the long-bow, although there never was a more truthful man.”

 

“People won’t judge us so harshly, major,” said Wilkins; “for so many African travellers have corroborated Mungo Park’s stories that the truth is pretty well known and believed by people of average education. But pray is it your lordship’s pleasure that I should accompany Tom? You know he cannot take care of himself, and no one of the party can act so powerfully as a check on his inveterate propensity to inordinate smoking as myself.”

 

“You must have studied Johnson’s dictionary very closely in your boyhood,” said Tom, puffing a prolonged cloud as a termination to the sentence.

 

“But, major, if you do condemn me to his company, please let us have Mafuta again, for Wilkins and I are like two uncongenial stones, and he acts as lime to keep us together.”

 

“Don’t you think that Hicks had better be consulted before we make arrangements?” suggested Pearson.

 

“Hear, hear,” cried Ogilvie; “and I should like to know what is to be done with Brand and Anson, for they are both very much down with fever of some sort this morning.”

 

“Leave Jumbo with them,” said Tom Brown; “he’s better at nursing than hunting. By the way, was it not he who nursed the native that died last night in the kraal?”

 

“It was, and they say he killed the poor nigger by careless treatment,” said Pearson.

 

“What nigger do you refer to?” asked Ogilvie.

 

“The one who died—but, I forgot, you were out after that hyena when it happened, and so I suppose have not heard of it,” said Pearson. “We had a funeral in the village over there last night, and they say that our fellow Jumbo, who it seems was once a friend of the sick man, offered to sit up with him last night. There is a rumour that he was an enemy of Jumbo’s, and that our cowardly scoundrel made this offer in order to have an opportunity of killing him in a quiet way. Hicks even goes the length of saying he is sure that Jumbo killed him, for when he saw the sick man last he was under the impression what he had got the turn, and gave him a powder that would have been certain to cure—”

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