A TALE OF THREE LIONS
Page: 20

how were we to beguile the lioness to return? Lions are animals that
have a strange knack of appearing when they are not wanted, and
keeping studiously out of the way when their presence is required. Of
course it was possible that if she had found Jim-Jim to her liking she
would come back to see if there were any more of his kind about, but
still it was not to be relied on.

"Harry, who as I have said was an eminently practical boy, suggested
to Pharaoh that he should go and sit outside the skerm in the
moonlight as a sort of bait, assuring him that he would have nothing
to fear, as we should certainly kill the lioness before she killed
him. Pharaoh however, strangely enough, did not seem to take to this
suggestion. Indeed, he walked away, much put out with Harry for having
made it.

"It gave me an idea, however.

"'By Jove!' I said, 'there is the sick ox. He must die sooner or
later, so we may as well utilize him.'

"Now, about thirty yards to the left of our skerm, as one stood facing
down the hill towards the river, was the stump of a tree that had been
destroyed by lightning many years before, standing equidistant
between, but a little in front of, two clumps of bush, which were
severally some fifteen paces from it.

"Here was the very place to tie the ox; and accordingly a little
before sunset the sick animal was led forth by Pharaoh and made fast
there, little knowing, poor brute, for what purpose; and we began our
long vigil, this time without a fire, for our object was to attract
the lioness and not to scare her.

"For hour after hour we waited, keeping ourselves awake by pinching
each other--it is, by the way, remarkable what a difference of opinion
as to the force of pinches requisite to the occasion exists in the
mind of pincher and pinched--but no lioness came. At last the moon
went down, and darkness swallowed up the world, as the Kaffirs say,
but no lions came to swallow us up. We waited till dawn, because we
did not dare to go to sleep, and then at last with many bad thoughts
in our hearts we took such rest as we could get, and that was not
much.

"That morning we went out shooting, not because we wanted to, for we