Maiwa’s Revenge

I

Gobo Strikes

One day—it was about a week after Allan Quatermain told me his story of the “Three Lions,” and of the moving death of Jim-Jim—he and I were walking home together on the termination of a day’s shooting. He owned about two thousand acres of shooting round the place he had bought in Yorkshire, over a hundred of which were wood. It was the second year of his occupation of the estate, and already he had reared a very fair head of pheasants, for he was an all-round sportsman, and as fond of shooting with a shotgun as with an eight-bore rifle. We were three guns that day, Sir Henry Curtis, Old Quatermain, and myself; but Sir Henry was obliged to leave in the middle of the afternoon in order to meet his agent, and inspect an outlying farm where a new shed was wanted. However, he was coming back to dinner, and going to bring Captain Good with him, for Brayley Hall was not more than two miles from the Grange.

We had met with very fair sport, considering that we were only going through outlying cover for cocks. I think that we had killed twenty-seven, a woodcock and a leash of partridges which we secured out of a driven covey. On our way home there lay a long narrow spinney, which was a very favourite “lie” for woodcocks, and generally held a pheasant or two as well.

“Well, what do you say?” said old Quatermain, “shall we beat through this for a finish?”

I assented, and he called to the keeper who was following with a little knot of beaters, and told him to beat the spinney.