enough to me though while we were doing it. Taking more chance driving that way across the plain full of holes and one thing and another than hunting on foot. Buffalo could have charged us each time we shot if he liked. Gave him every chance. Wouldn’t mention it to any one though. It’s illegal if that’s what you mean.”
“It seemed very unfair to me,” Margot said, “chasing those big helpless things in a motor car.”
“Did it?” said Wilson.
“What would happen if they heard about it in Nairobi?”
“I’d lose my licence for one thing. Other unpleasantnesses,” Wilson said, taking a drink from the flask. “I’d be out of business.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“Well,” said Macomber, and he smiled for the first time all day. “Now she has something on you.”
“You have such a pretty way of putting things, Francis,” Margot Macomber said. Wilson looked at them both. If a four-letter man marries a five-letter woman, he was thinking, what number of letters would their children be? What he said was, “We lost a gun-bearer. Did you notice it?”
“My God, no,” Macomber said.
“Here he comes,” Wilson said. “He’s all right. He must have fallen off when we left the first bull.”
Approaching them was the middle-aged gun-bearer, limping along in his knitted cap, khaki tunic, shorts and rubber sandals, gloomy-faced and disgusted looking. As he came up he called out to Wilson in Swahili and they all saw the change in the white hunter’s face.
“What does he say?” asked Margot.
“He says the first bull got up and went into the bush,” Wilson said with no expression in his voice.
“Oh,” said Macomber blankly.
“Then it’s going to be just like the lion,” said Margot, rull of anticipation.
