“It was the smell that gave me warning. I turned my head and found myself looking at a lion three feet off⁠ ⁠… An old man-eater, that was the terror of the village⁠ ⁠… What was left of the mare, a mass of blood and bones and hide, was behind him.”

“What happened?” I asked. I was enough of a hunter to know a true yarn when I heard it.

“I stuffed my fishing-rod into his jaws, and I had a pistol. Also my servants came presently with rifles. But he left his mark on me.” He held up a hand which lacked three fingers.

“Consider,” he said. “The mare had been dead more than an hour, and the brute had been patiently watching me ever since. I never saw the kill, for I was accustomed to the mare’s fretting, and I never marked her absence, for my consciousness of her was only of something tawny, and the lion filled that part. If I could blunder thus, gentlemen, in a land where men’s senses are keen, why should we busy preoccupied urban folk not err also?”

Sir Walter nodded. No one was ready to gainsay him.