That was a crisis, and I saw elephants--elephants! I remembered some of what Courtney had told us--some of the mad yarns Coutlass spun when liquor and the camp-fire made him boastful.

All the advice I ever heard; all my previous imaginings of what I should do when such a time came, seemed to be condensed into one concrete demand--shoot, shoot, shoot, and keep on shooting! Yet my finger, bent around the trigger, absolutely would not act! The oncoming gray wave of brutes split apart at the rock, as it must do, some of them screaming as they crashed into it breast on and were crushed by the crowd behind.

In the van of the right-hand wing, brushing the rock with his shoulder, charged an enormous bull with tusks so large that the heavier had weighed down his head to a permanent rakish angle.

He caught sight of me--trumpeted like a siren in the Channel fog--and came at me with raised ears and trunk outstretched.

I heard shooting to the left, and more shots from the forest, where the very active ghost or madman was keeping up a battle of his own.