Adventure Magazine Cover — page 110: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

108 horns and no horns at all! They were all there, nearly all squealing like a thousand ungreased brakes, snorting or blowing off steam like all the engines of a terminal. round-house, and all pushing and shoving and squeezing like pigs in a cattle-market pen toward the pool. They were all there for water—perhaps. Certainly water rhino must have. But Kifaru had marched thirty miles from water, for one, so—that’s that. Another too could not have stayed there in that press solely for water at any rate, for she was standing smack in the middle of the pool all shining wet, and remarkable— besides the shrillness of her locomotive- whistle squeal—in that she owned the long- est, thinnest pair of bayonet horns that ever one did see. By the slenderness of her horns one knew her sex; but Kifaru, being far away, must have gained enlighten- ment otherwise. Rhinoceroses were continually arriving and leaving the assembly—going off arm in arm, so to speak, to their respective corners of the wilderness—but Kifaru, for all his age, was the only one of the whole lot who, from the day the .450 Express bullet coming from nowhere special took his mother in the forward ribs and she died, had never seen a rhinoceros before. Now he was seeing them in bulk, was looking down upon a sort of annual dance of the rhinoceroses in their ballroom. At least, that is what the natives think. Elephants indulge in a yearly ball, so why not rhinos? Only in this case it was not so much a dance as a “scrum.” Kifaru, however, was “‘the goods.” For a space he had remained transfixed, mes- merized. Then what he saw and heard— a man could not have heard himself shout above the dim—went to his head, and he galloped down that slope and into that heaving mass like a—like an avalanche. It will always remain one of the myster- ies of Kifaru’s career—but then so little is known of their life anyway, only plenty after their death—how he managed to get through that conglomeration of assembled monsters without being: 1, squeezed flat; 2; horned to ribbons; or 3, trampled to mud; but he did, though it took him'some time, and the whistling snorts, the squeal- ing and the general terrifying uproar in his vicinity were prodigious. Now the position of that black, bayonet- Adventure horned female bulk in the middle of that pool there, though it appeared precarious, was really peculiar. With squeals that absolutely made one deaf she rushed upon and drove off every other rhino that at- tempted to drink at the pool, male or female, and so shamefully, selfishly con- ducted herself that unless they were willing to fight for it, it looked any odds on the whole gathering going without a drink that night. Of course they could have fought for it, but the bull rhinos seemed to feel restrained by some antediluvian or pachyderm eti- quette about “going for’ a lady, while the cows appeared to take into consideration the obvious fact—as revealed by moonlight —that this was not only a lady rhinoceros of exceptional bulk, but that her horns were abominably long. Therefore all the noise. Therefore also, no water. But how human, after all; how like a profiteer. Rhinoceroses possess the tempers of Eblis at the best of times, and it takes very, very little to touch them off, so to speak. All the same, things must have transpired to Kifaru in forcing his way through that crowd that would have slain a lesser brute. Be that as it may, Kifaru arrived at the pool on end with rage—literally on end, prancing on his hind legs, dancing, pawing the cold night, choking, backfiring, exploding with rage, spinning round and round darting hither and yon, and generally behaving as if possessed of all the fiends on cinders. The big female rhinoceros, standing in the pond, watched him. She watched him lower his hooky nose and drink. She watched another vast bull rhino bulk hurl at him with the deadly, low, long, sudden rush of all the pigs—hurl himself at Kifaru’s battleship-like stern, and—meet Kifaru’s yard-long, curving, murderous front horn instead. You know the awful, heaving, wrenching, sidelong slash of the pigs. Just so it lifted that rhino almost bodily into the air instead. How Kifaru had swerved his ponderous bulk about in the quarter second of grace and with no warning given is one of those unfathomable secrets of the great pachy- derms that Nature has not so far chosen to reveal. One thing only we know; power, steam-power, could not have spun his tons’ burden round in the time, or rather the lack of time, he received anyway. MICLOOOK C@ inn