For the rest, if he contrived to cheat the newspapers of the full details, he would actually risk his repute as a veracious citizen if he told the plain truth about one day’s history in the Republic of San Juan.
Once, in his teens, when in London during a never-to-be-forgotten European tour, a friend of his father’s pointed out a small, alert man,dressed in gray tweeds, who was hailing a cab in Pall Mall, and said:
“Look, Alec! That is Evans of the Guides. I met him five years ago in Lucknow, and even at that date he had killed his sixty-first tiger on foot and alone. He never shoots stripes any other way. He says it isn’t quite sporting to tackle the brute from the comparative safety of a howdah or a machan —a platform rigged in a tree, you know.”
Philip Alexander Maseden, aged
