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"All right, pax, pax! Sorry for using that word. So how did you get in here?" "That's the gray section, towards the end." Julia flipped through and tried to read them. "This is worse than 'Finnegans Wake'." "You don't know the half of it. But as I was reading that, I got blipped to Wildwood Park." "Blipped?" "Pinged. You know, there one second, gone the next. Zap!
Then he started to search hither and thither for the precious mahogany case which held the amputating knives, the tourniquets and the trephine. The Zappo Zap was no use, as he did not know anything about the stores, and had never even seen the instrument case, so Adams had to conduct the search alone, in a hurry, and over half an acre of ground.
"What did you bring this thing for?" asked Berselius, pointing to Adams's elephant gun, which the Zappo Zap headman was just stripping from its covering. "To shoot with," said Adams, laughing. Berselius looked at the big man handling the big gun, and gave a short laugh. "Well, bring it," said he; "but I don't envy your gun-bearers." But Félix, the headman, did not seem of the same opinion.
He certainly never would have conceived so devilish a one. Adams had, fortunately for himself, fired the right-hand barrel; the concussion had not broken up the plug, for it was still moist, being clay from the trodden-up edge of the pool. It was moist still, for the night dew had found it. The Zappo Zap knew nothing of the plug.
The dry ground and wire grass was not the best medium for taking the track of the beasts, but to the experienced eyes of Berselius and the Zappo Zap everything was clear. A herd of elephant had passed not long ago, and they were undisturbed and unsuspicious. When elephants are suspicious they march in lines, single file, one stepping in the tracks of another.
Berselius, moving uneasily in his sleep, had flung out his arm; the clenched fist, like the emblem of power, struck the eye of the Zappo Zap, and quelled him as the sight of the whip quells a dog. B'selius was alive and able to clench his fist.
The Zappo Zap had gone apart from the camp to sleep. He had drugged himself by smoking hemp, and he was lying half a hundred yards away, face down on the ground, dead to everything in earth and heaven. Berselius had spied him. What Adams saw then was, perhaps, the most heroic act ever recorded of man.
Berselius had been slowly stripped by the wilderness of everything now but the clothes he stood up in, his companion and two porters. Guns, equipment, tents, stores, the Zappo Zap, and the army of men under that ferocious lieutenant, had all "gone dam."
It was full, blazing day, and the Zappo Zap, standing erect just as he had sprung from sleep, was staring with wrinkled eyes straight out across the land. Two black figures were approaching. They were the two porters who had fled westward, and who, with Félix, were all that remained of Berselius's savage train of followers. The rest were over there
Now the Zappo Zap, when he had fled from Adams, put ten miles of country behind him, going almost with the swiftness of an antelope, taking low bush and broken ground in his stride, and halting only when instinct brought him to a stand, saying, "You are safe."
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