with a short gun of a kind I have never seen before or since. Five times, one after another” (the Mugger must have met with an old-fashioned revolver); “and I stayed open-mouthed and gaping, my head in the smoke. Never did I see such a thing. Five times, as swiftly as I wave my tail — thus!”

The Jackal, who had been growing more and more interested in the story, had just time to leap back as the huge tail swung by like a scythe.

“Not before the fifth shot,” said the Mugger, as though he had never dreamed of stunning one of his listeners — ”not before the fifth shot did I sink, and I rose in time to hear a boatman telling all those white women that I was most certainly dead.

One bullet had gone