I tried to stalk them--a rash, reprehensible, tenderfoot trick.
Luck was with me; they slunk away in the shadows, and I lived to summon Fred and Will.

We tried to save the donkeys, but the lions took three of them at their leisure, and scared the rest so that they broke out of the thorn-bush boma we had made the boys build (as a precaution against leopards, not lions).

Next morning out of forty we recovered twenty-five, and wondered how many of them Schillingschen got.
Remembering how we ourselves had managed, without ammunition or supplies, we did not fool ourselves with the belief that Schillingschen, with his brutal personal magnetism and profound knowledge of natives, would not do better.

The probability was he would stir up the countryside against us.
He had been doing missionary work; it might be the natives of that part were already sufficiently schooled to do murder at his bidding.
We decided to leave at once for a district where he had not yet done any of his infernal preaching.
"You should set a trap and shoot the swine!" Coutlass insisted.

Will was inclined to agree with him, but Fred and I demurred.