Although Grosvenor spoke in a tone of light raillery it but thinly disguised the depth of feeling that stirred him, as Dick fully realised when he pulled up alongside his friend and they exchanged hand-grips. Lightly as he spoke of the incident, Phil knew right well that he was on the very edge of disaster at the moment that Dick pulled trigger, and though he would fain have treated the whole adventure as a joke he was none the less grateful to Dick for his timely intervention, and the pressure of his hand was quite as eloquent as much outpouring of words. "By Jove," exclaimed Dick, as he swung out of his saddle and loosened the girths, to enable his horse the more readily to recover his wind, "what a monster! He is far and away the biggest elephant that I have ever seen; and if his tusks had been unbroken they would have been a prize worth having, if only as curiosities. As it is, I don't think it will be worth while to waste time in cutting out the stumps; do you? Poor beggar, he must have been suffering pretty badly from toothache; see how tremendously that left gum is swollen. That means an abscess at the root of the tusk that must have been dreadfully painful. No wonder that he was in such a dickens of a bad temper! Well, he is of no value to us, except as a contribution to our larder, so we may as well be going. We will mark the spot where he lies, and send Mafuta and Jantje for one of his feet, which will furnish us with an epicurean dinner to- night. And now I suppose we may as well go and look for the wagon, for of course the giraffes cleared out directly the rumpus began." They camped that night in the midst of a wide plateau dotted here and there with low _kopjes_ of outcropping granite, and clothed for the most part with _melkboom_ interspersed with patches of low thornbush and sun- dried grass; and, from the fact that they had met with no water since noon, they greeted with much satisfaction the discovery of a shallow water-hole of some two acres in extent, within about half a mile of which they outspanned for the night, an hour before sunset. They did not care to approach nearer to the water than this, for upon inspecting the place they became aware, from the spoor in the mud all round the margin, that it was the favourite if not the only drinking place for all the animals in the neighbourhood, and past experienced had taught them that the nocturnal sounds emanating from such a spot were the reverse of favourable to sleep. Moreover, they had detected among the most recent spoor that of lions; and for the sake of their cattle they preferred to keep at a respectful distance from a place frequented by such formidable animals.