It plainly intended murder, but which of us was to be the victim, and when, there was no means of guessing, so that the nerves of all of us were tortured every time the brute approached.
We wasted at least thirty cartridges on futile efforts to guess his whereabouts in velvet black shadows, and Brown went through all the stages from simple nervousness to fear, and then to frenzy, until we feared he would shoot one of us in frantic determination to ring the leopard's knell.
At last the brute did rush in, and of course where least expected.

He seized one of our porters by the shoulder, his claws doing more damage than his teeth.

I shot him by thrusting my rifle into his ear, and although that dropped him instantly his claws, in the dying spasm and by the weight of his fall, tore wounds in the man's arm eighteen or twenty inches long.
One of the things we did have with us was bandages.

But it took time to attend to the man's wounds properly by lamp and moonlight, and after that he could neither march fast, nor was there anywhere to leave him.
So just before dawn Fred came up with us, and was more pleased at our discomfiture than sympathetic.

He told off two men to carry the injured porter to a mission station more than a day's march away, and redistributed the loads.