09 Lion Adventure Read Online Free

mean, we’ll see that they are protected. 111 order my medicine man to cast a spell over them. Tell them to have no fear of claws or teeth. No harm can come to them. You will tell them?’
    ‘I will tell them.’
    He did. In the dingy little railway station the boys listened to Tanga’s assurance that King Ku would take care of them.
    Then, leaving Tanga at his desk, they went out to walk up and down the railway platform and wonder what it all meant.
    ‘Why is Ku so anxious to have us think we can’t be hurt?’ puzzled Hal. ‘Is he trying to throw us off guard? Does he want us to take chances so we will be hurt? What can that old geezer have against us?’
    ‘He looks savage enough to be capable of most anything,’ Roger said. ‘And Tanga - you know he was the one who got us into this. Do you suppose the two of them are trying to do us in?’
    ‘Tanga seems such a good guy.’ Hal said. ‘Always smiling.’
    ‘I know. But smiles don’t mean much. You know what Hamlet said - about how a fellow can “smile, and smile, and be a villain”.’
    ‘Well,’ Hal said, ‘I’m not going to worry myself sick about it. Let’s go get a little shut-eye to make up for last flight.’
    In their tent which had been pitched close to the railway track they tossed restlessly on their cots.
    ‘What I can’t understand,’ Roger said, ‘is how all this man-eating got started. Why is it so bad here?’
    ‘You’ve heard of “the man-eaters of Tsavo”?’
    ‘It sort of rings a bell. What’s the story?’
    ‘It happened right here. A couple of thousand men were building this stretch of railway. Their boss was a construction engineer named Colonel Patterson.
    ‘Some of the men got sick and died. Colonel Patterson ordered several men to bury the dead, and paid them extra for digging the graves. The men took the money, but they were too lazy to dig graves. They just hid the corpses in the bushes.
    ‘Game was scarce that year and the lions were hungry. Two of them found the bodies and ate them. That gave them a taste for human flesh. More men died and were eaten. The lions came every night. One night they found no corpses - so they broke into a tent, dragged out two men, killed them, and ate them.’
    Roger sat bolt upright. ‘You mean they came straight into a tent - a tent like this?’ ‘Exactly like this. And they kept coming every night.’ ‘But didn’t this Colonel Patterson do anything about it?’
     
    ‘He tried. But remember, he was an engineer, not a hunter. He had plenty of courage, but he didn’t quite know how to go about it. He would sit up in a tree with a gun near the spot where a man had been killed the night before. The lions had too much sense to go there again. They would attack somewhere else.’
    ‘One night he sat up on a branch above the body of a man who had just died. Having been up every night, the colonel was very tired. He went to sleep. A growl below disturbed him. he moved a little, and fell plop on to a lion. Luckily the lion was so startled that it ran off into the bush.’
    ‘The colonel built a lion trap. It was a big box made out of wood and iron and the door was fixed so it would close and lock if a spring in the floor was stepped on. At the back of the box he fenced off a small room and put a couple of men in it. They were safe behind bars. The idea was that the lion would come into the cage after the men and would step on the spring and lock himself in.’
    ‘One of the man-eaters did walk into the trap, stepped on the spring, and the door snapped shut. The lion roared and woke the camp. The colonel and four of his men with rifles came running and fired twenty bullets into the cage. They couldn’t see very well - they missed the lion but one of their bullets broke the latch, the door swung open, and the lion escaped.’
    ‘The colonel tried tin pans. He had his men surround a man-eater where it lay in the brush. Each man was armed with several tin pans. A passage was left