“You don’t wait long when you have an advantage, do you?”
“Please let’s not talk. I’m so sleepy, darling.”
“I’m going to talk.”
“Don’t mind me then, because I’m going to sleep.” And she did.
At breakfast they were all three at the table before daylight and Francis Macomber found that, of all the many men that he had hated, he hated Robert Wilson the most.
“Sleep well?” Wilson asked in his throaty voice, filling a pipe.
“Did you?”
“Topping,” the white hunter told him.
You bastard, thought MaComber, you insolent bastard.
So she woke him when she came in, Wilson thought, looking at them both with his flat, cold eyes. Well, why doesn’t he keep his wife where she belongs? What does he think I am, a bloody plaster saint? Let him keep her where she belongs. It’s his own fault.
“Do you think we’ll find buffalo?” Margot asked, pushing away a dish of apricots.
“Chance of it,” Wilson said and smiled at her. “Why don’t you stay in camp?”
“Not for anything,” she told him.
“Why not order her to stay in camp?” Wilson said to Macomber.
“You order her,” said Macomber coldly.
“Let’s not have any ordering, nor,” turning to Macomber, “any silliness. Francis,” Margot said quite pleasantly.
“Are you ready to start?” Macomber asked.
“Any time,” Wilson told him. “Do you want the Memsahib to go?”
“Does it make any difference whether I do or not?”
The hell with it, thought Robert Wilson. The utter complete hell with it. So this is what it’s going to be like. Well, this is what it’s going to be like, then.
“Makes no difference,” he said.
“You’re sure you wouldn’t like to stay in camp with her yourself and let me go out and hunt the buffalo?” Macomber asked.
“Can’t do that,” said Wilson. “Wouldn’t talk rot if I were you.”
“I’m not talking rot. I’m disgusted.”
“Bad word, disgusted.”
“Francis, will you please try to speak sensibly,” his wife said.
“I speak too damned sensibly,” Macomber said. “Did you ever eat such filthy food?”
“Something wrong with the food?” asked Wilson quietly.
“No more than with everything else.”
“I’d pull yourself together, laddybuck,” Wilson said very quietly. “There’s a boy waits at table that understands a little English.”
“The hell with him.”
Wilson stood up and puffing on his pipe strolled away, speaking a few words in Swahili to one of the gun-bearers who was standing waiting for him. Macomber and his wife sat on at the table. He was staring at his coffee cup.
“If you make a scene I’ll leave you, darling,” Margot said quietly.
“No, you won’t.”
“You can try it and see.”
“You won’t leave me.”
“No,” she said. “I won’t leave you and you’ll behave your self.”
“Behave myself? That’s a way to talk. Behave myself.”
“Yes. Behave yourself.”
“Why don’t you try behaving?”
“I’ve tried it so long. So very long.”
“I hate that red-faced swine,” Macomber said. “I loathe the sight of him.”
“He’s really very nice.”
“Oh, shut up,” Macomber almost shouted. Just then the car came up and stopped in front of the dining tent and the driver and the two gunbearers got out. Wilson walked over and looked at the husband and wife sitting there at the table.
“Going shooting?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Macomber, standing up. “Yes.”
“Better bring a woolly. It will be cool in the car,” Wilson said.
“I’ll get my leather jacket,” Margot said.
“The boy has it,” Wilson told her. He climbed into the front with the driver and Francis Macomber and his wife sat, not speaking, in the back seat.
Hope the silly beggar doesn’t take a notion to blow the back of my head off, Wilson thought to himself. Women are a nuisance on safari.
The car was grinding down to cross the river at a pebbly ford in the gray daylight and then climbed, angling up the steep bank, where Wilson had ordered a way shovelled out the day before so they could reach the parklike wooded rolling country on the far side.
It was a good morning, Wilson thought. There was a heavy dew and as the wheels went through the grass and low bushes he could smell the odor of the crushed fronds. It was an odor like verbena and he liked this early morning smell of the dew, the crushed bracken and the look of the tree trunks showing black through the early morning mist, as the car made its way through the untracked, parklike country. He had put the two in the back seat out of his mind now and was thinking about buffalo. The buffalo that he was after stayed in the daytime in a thick swamp where it was impossible to get a shot, but in the night they fed out into an open stretch of country and if he could come between them and their swamp with the car, Macomber would have a good chance at them in the open.
He did not want to hunt buff with Macomber in thick cover. He did not want to hunt buff or anything else with Macomber at all, but he was a professional hunter and he had hunted with some rare ones in his time. If they got buff today there would only be rhino to come and the poor man would have gone through his dangerous game and things might pick up. He’d have nothing more to do with the woman and Macomber would get over that too. He must have gone through plenty of that before by the look of things. Poor beggar. He must have a way of getting over it. Well, it was the poor sod’s own bloody fault.
He, Robert Wilson, carried a double size cot on safari to accommodate any windfalls he might receive. He had hunted for a certain clientele, the international, fast, sporting set, where the women did not feel they were getting their money’s worth unless they had shared that cot with the white hunter. He despised them when he was away from them although he liked some of them well enough at the time, but he made his living by them; and their standards were his standards as long as they were hiring him.
They were his standards in all except the shooting. He had his own standards about the killing and they could live up to them or get some one else to hunt them. He knew, too, that they all respected him for this. This Macomber was an odd one though. Damned if he wasn’t. Now the wife. Well, the wife. Yes, the wife. Hm, the wife. Well he’d dropped all that. He looked around at them. Macomber sat grim and furious. Margot smiled at him. She looked younger today, more innocent and fresher and not so professionally beautiful. What’s in her heart God knows, Wilson thought. She hadn’t talked much last night. At that it was a pleasure to see her.
The motor car climbed up a slight rise and went on through the trees and then out into a grassy prairie-like opening and kept in the shelter of the trees along the edge, the driver going slowly and Wilson looking carefully out across the prairie and all along its far side. He stopped the car and studied the opening with his field glasses. Then he motioned to the driver to go on and the car moved slowly along, the driver avoiding warthog holes and driving around the mud castles ants had built. Then, looking across the opening, Wilson suddenly turned and said,
“By God, there they are!”
And looking where he pointed, while the car jumped forward and Wilson spoke in rapid Swahili to the driver, Macomber saw three huge, black animals looking almost cylindrical in their long heaviness, like big black tank cars, moving at a gallop across the far edge of the open prairie. They moved at a stiff-necked, stiff bodied gallop and he could see the upswept wide black horns on their heads as they galloped heads out; the heads not moving.
“They’re three old bulls,” Wilson said. “We’ll cut them off before they get to the swamp.”
The car was going a wild forty-five miles an hour across the open and as Macomber watched, the buffalo got bigger and bigger until he could see the gray, hairless, scabby look of one huge bull and how his neck was a part of his shoulders and the shiny black of his horns as he galloped a little behind the others that were strung out in that steady plunging gait; and then, the car swaying as though it had just jumped a road, they drew up close and he could see the plunging hugeness of the bull, and the dust in his sparsely haired hide, the wide boss of horn and his outstretched, wide-nostrilled muzzle, and he was raising his rifle when Wilson shouted, “Not from the car, you fool!” and he had no fear, only hatred of Wilson, while the brakes clamped on and the car skidded, plowing sideways to an almost stop and Wilson was out on one side and he on the other, stumbling as his feet hit the still speeding-by of the earth, and then he was shooting at the bull as he moved away, hearing the bullets whunk into him, emptying his rifle at him as he moved steadily away, finally remembering to get his shots forward into the shoulder, and as he fumbled to re-load, he saw the bull was down. Down on his knees, his big head tossing, and seeing the other two still galloping he shot at the leader and hit him. He shot again and missed and he heard the carawonging roar as Wilson shot and saw
