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Updated: May 25, 2025
"Our third plan," said Yarner deliberately, feeling that the talk was now getting really interesting, "let me see, our third plan was to cut across from Socotra to Tananarivo." "Oh, yes," I said. "However, all that was changed, and changed under the strangest circumstances. We were sitting, Gallon and I, on the piazza of the Galle Face Hotel in Colombo you know the Galle Face?"
Imagine yourself in a wild, rolling country covered here and there with kwas along the sides of the nullahs." I did so. "Well," continued Yarner, "we were sitting in our tent one hot night too hot to sleep when all at once we heard, not ten feet in front of us, the most terrific roar that ever came from the throat of a lion."
All of a sudden the beast whirled itself into a coil, its eyes fastened with hideous malignity on poor Gallon, and with its head erect it emitted the most awful hiss I have heard proceed from the mouth of any living snake." Here Yarner paused and took a long, hissing drink of whiskey and soda: and then as the malignity died out of his face
Last week, for example, in an unguarded moment I fell a victim. I had been guilty of the imprudence I forget in what connection of speaking of lions. I realized at once that I had done wrong lions, giraffes, elephants, rickshaws and natives of all brands, are topics to avoid in talking with a traveller. "Speaking of lions," began Yarner. He was right, of course; I HAD spoken of lions.
He was especially dangerous if he was found with a newspaper in his hand; because that meant that some item of foreign intelligence had gone to his brain. Not that I should have objected to Yarner describing his travels. Any man who has bought a ticket round the world and paid for it, is entitled to that. But it was his manner of discussion that I considered unpermissible.
As he said this Yarner paused to take a gulp of bubbling whiskey and soda and looked at me so ferociously that I actually shivered. Then quite suddenly his manner cooled down in the strangest way, and his voice changed to a commonplace tone as he said, "Perhaps I ought to explain that we hadn't come up to the up-country looking for big game.
Nothing but the blackened skulls can be seen. They are all together. The sad scenes will never all be written. One lady told me this morning of seeing her mother crushed to pieces just before her eyes and the mangled body carried off down the stream. William Yarner lost six children and saved a baby about eighteen months old. His wife died just three weeks ago.
And, of course" here the doctor paused to ring the bell to order two Manhattan cocktails "as soon as he touched alcohol he was done." So that was the end of the valetudinarianism of Mr. Podge. I have always considered that I killed him. But anyway, he was a nuisance at the club. The Amazing Travels of Mr. Yarner There was no fault to be found with Mr. Yarner till he made his trip around the world.
And as I happened at that very moment to be rescued by an incoming friend, who took but little interest in lions, and even less in Yarner, I have still to learn why the lion howled so when it met Yarner. But surely the lion had reason enough. The Spiritual Outlook of Mr. Doomer One generally saw old Mr. Doomer looking gloomily out of the windows of the library of the club.
Because he is an Irishman he is an incorrigible romanticist, and I suspect that characterization interests him for the story's sake rather than for itself alone. But now that Richard Harding Davis is dead, I suppose that James B. Connolly may fairly take his place as our best born yarner, with all a yarner's privileges.
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