Still Glahn made no answer. Instead, he showed his childishness once more, shooting the dead leopard again, this time through the head. I looked at him in utter astonishment.
“Well, you know,” he explains, “I shouldn't like to have it said that I shot a leopard in the flank.”
“You are very amiable this evening,” I said.
It was too much for his vanity to have made such a poor shot; he must always be first. What a fool he was! But it was no business of mine, anyway. I was not going to show him up.
In the evening, when we came back to the village with the dead leopard, a lot of the natives came out to look at it. Glahn simply said we had shot it that morning, and made no sort of fuss about it himself at the time. Maggie came up too.
“You can see for yourself--twice hit. We shot it this morning when we went out.” And he turned the beast over and showed her the two bullet wounds, both that in the flank and that in the head. “That's where mine went,” he said, pointing to the side--in his idiotic fashion he wanted me to have the credit of having shot it in the head. I did not trouble to correct him; I said nothing. After that, Glahn began treating the natives with rice beer--gave them any amount of it, as many as cared to drink.
“Both shot it,” said Maggie to herself; but she was looking at Glahn all the time.
“What are you looking at him all the time for? I am here too, I suppose?”
“Yes,” she said. “And listen: I am coming this evening.”
It was the day after this that Glahn got the letter. There came a letter for him, sent up by express messenger from the river station, and it had made a detour of a hundred and eighty miles. The letter was in a woman's hand, and I thought to my self that perhaps it was from that former friend of his, the noble lady. Glahn laughed nervously when he had read it, and gave the messenger extra money for bringing it. But it was not long before he turned silent and gloomy, and did nothing but sit staring straight before him. That evening he got drunk--sat drinking with an old dwarf of a native and his son, and clung hold of me too, and did all he could to make me drink as well.
“Here we are, the two of us, miles away in the middle of all India shooting game--what? Desperately funny, isn't it? And hurrah for all the lands and kingdoms of the earth, and hurrah for all the pretty women, married or unmarried, far and near. Hoho! Nice thing for a man when a married woman proposes to him, isn't it--a married woman?”