I turned my head and
found myself looking at a lion three feet off ... An old man-eater,
that was the terror of the village ... What was left of the mare, a
mass of blood and bones and hide, was behind him.'
'What happened?' I asked. I was enough of a hunter to know a
true yarn when I heard it.
'I stuffed my fishing-rod into his jaws, and I had a pistol. Also
my servants came presently with rifles. But he left his mark on me.'
He held up a hand which lacked three fingers.
'Consider,' he said. 'The mare had been dead more than an hour,
and the brute had been patiently watching me ever since. I never
saw the kill, for I was accustomed to the mare's fretting, and I
never marked her absence, for my consciousness of her was only of
something tawny, and the lion filled that part. If I could blunder
thus, gentlemen, in a land where men's senses are keen, why should
we busy preoccupied urban folk not err also?'
Sir Walter nodded. No one was ready to gainsay him.
'But I don't see,' went on Winstanley. 'Their object was to get
these dispositions without our knowing it. Now it only required
one of us to mention to Alloa our meeting tonight for the whole
fraud to be exposed.'
Sir Walter laughed dryly. 'The selection of Alloa shows their
acumen. Which of us was likely to speak to him about tonight? Or
was he likely to open the subject?'
I remembered the First Sea Lord's reputation for taciturnity and
shortness of temper.
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