His horse was a stout little Abyssinian shooting pony, gray of color and lean in build, and in the blood-stained saddle-bag was a well-worn copy of Macaulay's _Essays_, bound in pigskin.

Our hero--for it was he--was none other than Bwana Tumbo, the hunter-naturalist, exponent of the strenuous life, and ex-president of the United States.
[Drawing: _Improving Each Shining Hour_] If I were writing a thrilling story of adventure that is the way this story would begin.

But as this is designed to be a simple chronicle of events, it is just as well at once to get down to basic facts and tell about the Roosevelt elephant hunt, the hyena episode, and the pigskin library, together with other more or less extraneous matter.
[Photograph: A Flag Flew Over the Colonel's Tent] [Photograph: Kermit and Mr.Stephenson Diagnosing the Case] Colonel Roosevelt, his son Kermit, Leslie Tarlton, who is managing the Roosevelt expedition, and Edmund Heller, the taxidermist of the expedition, came to our camp on the fourteenth of November to have luncheon and to talk over plans whereby Colonel Roosevelt was to kill one or more elephants for Mr.Akeley's American museum group of five or six elephants.

The details were all arranged and later in the afternoon the colonel and his party left for their own camp, only a short distance from ours.
Mr.Akeley, with one of our tents and about forty porters, followed later in the evening and spent the night at the Roosevelt camp.

The following morning Colonel Roosevelt, Mr.Akeley, Mr.Tarlton and Kermit, with two tents and forty porters and gunbearers, started early in the hope of again finding the trail of the small herd of elephants that had been seen the day before.