Riotous Assembly

'It's a magazine-loaded multi-barrelled elephant gun,' Miss Hazelstone replied. 'It was designed by my father, the late Judge Hazelstone and made to his own specifications. Its rate of fire is forty bullets a minute and it can incapacitate a charging elephant at a thousand yards.'

Van Heerden volunteered the opinion that it seemed u

'My father was a lousy shot,' Miss Hazelstone continued. 'Besides, he was a dreadful coward.'

'No man who fired that gun could be called a coward,' said the Kommandant both gallantly and truthfully. He was begi

'That rifle is far too heavy for a woman…I beg your pardon…for a lady to use,' he said and regretted the remark almost as soon as it was made. It was evident that Miss Hazelstone would respond to any challenge. She rose from her chair and aimed the great rifle into the garden.

The Kommandant had discounted any possibility that she might fire the thing. Konstabel Els, for once, acted with greater resourcefulness and threw himself to the ground. That the ground he chose was already occupied by a large Doberma

The Kommandant, who was standing some eighteen inches to the right of the four barrels and almost level with their muzzles and who, but an instant before, had been a rational-thinking human being in full possession of his senses, found himself as it seemed to him, in a vast and rapidly expanding bubble of flame. The sensible world of garden, sky, twittering birds, even the screams of Els being savaged by the Doberma

Konstabel Els' contretemps with the Doberma

Kommandant van Heerden turned what remained of his attention away from this unpleasant spectacle and tried to look at Miss Hazelstone who lay stu

Her second firing had destroyed what remained of the pedestal on which Sir Theophilus' bust had stood and, being aimed at ground level, had almost obliterated all traces of Fivepence's recently obeisant corpse. Almost but not entirely, for the fragmentary and dispersed remains of Sir Theophilus' bust had been joined on their widely separated patches of lawn by the no less fragmentary and dispersed remains of the late Zulu cook, while patches of black skin had attached themselves limpet-like to the blasted trunks of the gum trees that fringed the once-immaculate lawn. Kommandant van Heerden couldn't bring himself to focus on the round black object that kept trying to draw attention to itself by swinging wistfully from a branch in the upper reaches of an otherwise attractive blue gum. Down the centre of the lawn the elephant gun had cut a straight trench some eight inches in depth and fifteen yards long from whose serrated edges arose what the Kommandant despairingly hoped was steam.

Feeling that the afternoon's work and his recent transcendental experience had released him from the standards of politeness he had previously maintained in Miss Hazelstone's company, the Kommandant sat down uninvited in a chair well outside any likely arc of fire from the terrible elephant gun, and watched Konstabel Els' gladiatorial conflict with the Doberma

On the whole he thought they were pretty well matched both in physique and in intellectual grasp of the situation. Certainly Els suffered the disadvantage of a smaller jaw and fewer teeth, but what he lacked in biting power he made up for in concentration and experience in castration. The Kommandant did think, momentarily, of intervening but Miss Hazelstone had already acted with that decisiveness he had always found so admirable in persons of her class. She sent the Indian butler into the house and a moment later he returned with a bottle of ammonia and a large wad of cotton wool.

'The best way of separating dogs,' she shouted above the growls and groans, 'is to hold a pad of cotton wool soaked with ammonia over their muzzles. They gasp for air and you pull 'em apart,' and so saying she clamped the wad over Konstabel Els' already purple face. The Kommandant wondered at her choice of Els as the first to be forced to release his grip, but he put it down to the English love of animals and, to be fair to Miss Hazelstone, he knew her to be particularly fond of the Doberma

It was immediately apparent that the method was remarkably efficacious. With a muffled scream and all the symptoms of imminent asphyxia, Els released his grip on the dog's reproductive organs and was assisted in discontinuing the struggle by the Indian butler who, hanging on to his ankles, attempted to drag the Konstabel away.

Unfortunately for Els the Doberma