In the first place, he
had not bolted; in the second place, instead of running up to the
left side of my mount and perhaps colliding with and certainly
confusing me, he had come up on the right side and passed the
rifle to me ACROSS the horse.
I do not know whether or not he had
figured this out beforehand, but it was cleverly done.
The rhinoceros rolled over and over, like a shot rabbit, kicked
for a moment, and came to his feet. We were now all ready for
him, in battle array, but he had evidently had enough. He turned
at right angles and trotted off, apparently-and probably-none
the worse for the little bullet in his shoulder.
Fundi now began acquiring things that he supposed befitting to
his dignity. The first of these matters was a faded fez, in which
he stuck a long feather. From that he progressed in worldly
wealth. How he got it all, on what credit, or with what hypnotic
power, I do not know. Probably he hypothecated his wages,
certainly he had his five rupees.
At any rate he started out with a ragged undershirt and a pair of
white, baggy breeches. He entered Nairobi at the end of the trip
with a cap, a neat khaki shirt, two water bottles, a cartridge
belt, a sash with a tasseI, a pair of spiral puttees, an old pair
of shoes, and a personal private small boy, picked up en route
from some of the savage tribes, to carry his cooking pot, make
his fires, draw his water, and generally perform his lordly
behests. This was indeed "more-than-oriental-splendour!"
>From now on Fundi considered himself my second gunbearer. I had
no use for him, but Fundi's development interested me, and I
wanted to give him a chance. His main fault at first was
eagerness. He had to be rapped pretty sharply and a good number
of times before he discovered that he really must walk in the
rear. His habit of calling my attention to perfectly obvious
things I cured by liberal sarcasm. His intense desire to take his
own line as perhaps opposed to mine when we were casting about on
trail, I abated kindly but firmly with the toe of my boot. His
evident but mistaken tendency to consider himself on an equality
with Memba Sasa we both squelched by giving him the hard and
dirty work to do. But his faults were never those of voluntary
omission, and he came on surprisingly; in fact so surprisingly
that he began to get quite cocky over it. Not that he was ever in
the least aggressive or disrespectful or neglectful-it would
have been easy to deal with that sort of thing-but he carried
his head pretty high, and evidently began to have mental
reservations. Fundi needed a little wholesome discipline. He was
forgetting his porter days, and was rapidly coming to consider
himself a full-fledged gunbearer.
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