The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes Read Online Free PDF

yourself?' Sizenby quickly asked, dropping to one knee beside me. 'Did you actually see them?'
     
                  "Bruckheller appeared disconcerted, as if his word had been challenged and seemed at a loss for speech. He gobbled something unintelligible and then muttered, 'I hardly got a look. They took my hunters and I had two: one by one, they took them. I saw only a dark mass as they took the last one.'
     
                  " 'When was that and how did they let you get here, get to us? Come on, Man, speak up!' Sizenby seemed to be following a thought and his voice was fierce. I had no idea what he wanted, but he was clearly in charge so I shut up.
     
                  " 'How do I know?' snarled the Italian. 'Sometime yesterday afternoon, I think. I have been running and hiding, running and hiding. When I heard the shots I tried to get close, but always I would hear things moving. Why do you ask me all this?' His voice had taken on an unpleasant, grating whine, like that of a spoilt child who wishes to make excuses for a fault, but in some indefinable way it was even nastier.
     
                  " 'Just wondered, that's all,' said Sizenby in an absent tone. He was once again standing and watching the misty perimeter of visibility.
     
                  "Since that dreadful scream, no sound had come from out in the night. But now the far silence and the patter of drops of water from the bamboos were again broken. And once again it was the sound of running feet. Never very close and never very far away, the pad,' pad of the runner came through the chill silence. First on one side of the circle then on the other. We had learned our lesson though and we watched all sides.
     
                  "The sounds would cease at intervals, then commence again. The noises, indeed any sound in the bamboo forest, had a curious echoing quality, so that at times we seemed encompassed by legions of stealthy, padding feet, running on urgent and malignant errands. Yet at others there seemed only the one creature, running in the night, driven by some ancient and evil compulsion as if in search of a phantom prey.
     
                  "Somehow the night passed. As the grey dawn slowly widened our circle of vision, the invisible feet ceased. One moment they were active, the next gone and a few birds began a desultory chirping deep in the ranks of the bamboo tufts.
     
                  "At length the area one could see clearly had widened to almost a hundred feet and a hot circle in the eastern fog banks indicated the struggle of the sun to break through. We all relaxed a little and looked at one another for the first time.
     
                  " 'I sat up for the Tsavo maneaters ,' said Sizenby, passing his hand over his eyes, 'and at least once I heard them feeding on a Hindu railroad coolie twenty feet away from my tree. But it wasn't like this, I can tell you.' He looked grey and shriveled. Krock looked like the wrath of God too, and I could feel every nerve in my body aching from the constant strain of watching and waiting. The Negroes, Somali, Kikuyu and Wanderobo were silent, a bad sign if one knew them. Only Sergeant Asoto spoke, stepping forward to point at my feet.
     
                  " 'Sirs, is this the man we hunt? He looks bad to me.'
     
                  "This simple remark made me and the others remember our quarry, the reason for all this incredible strain and the nevus of our search, almost forgotten due to the night's stealthy evil.
     
                  "Bruckheller had been sitting crouched at my feet and as the Sergeant spoke, he looked up and I saw at once what the Sergeant's rather basic English meant. I had thought he meant that Bruckheller was ill when he said 'looked bad.' But it was obvious that the words were meant absolutely literally. The Italian's face seemed to have suffered some