Read The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes for Free Online

in him I will never know, but it was clear that a bond of some sort, psychic, spiritual perhaps, somehow connected him with that demon visage I had seen.
     
                  "At any rate, he hurled me on to the ground and throwing back his head (I was told this, I did not see it), he answered that horrible call with a perfect copy of it, slightly weakened but otherwise accurate. It was the last noise he ever made. Face down in the muck of that mountain meadow, I heard every rifle in our party explode simultaneously, some fired three or four times. Then, there was a great, ringing silence. I didn't move or even try to until I felt hands under my armpits and was hauled up to face the rest of the group.
     
                  "I turned then to look down at the late Dottore Guido Bruckheller. It was not a pleasant sight, since every bullet appeared to have hit, as well as two lion spears, but I felt then and still feel most strongly indeed that we had done the man an immense favor. It is not, I think, wise to speculate upon what he seemed well on the road to becoming. Whatever it was had no place in polite, or indeed human, society.
     
                  "Krock, Sizenby and I held a brief conference with Sergeant Asoto. The vote was unanimous. The men dug a rude grave, and, after I searched the body, unpleasant but necessary, and found nothing, we buried it. Then Asoto addressed the troops in Swahili, briefly, forcefully and, to me, unintelligibly. At the end of his speech he asked a question. I could catch the inflection as well as the answer, ' Asente ', which rang out.
     
                  " 'That means 'yes,' does it not?' I asked the two whites.
     
                  " 'Quite so,' said Sizenby. 'They shot the foreign bwana because he was shooting at them. End of story. What they'll say in their own villages doesn't matter. It was made plain that all this had best be forgotten.'
     
                  " 'Yah,' added Krock, 'and a good thing too. Listen, I hear of an English sea captain once who sees the sea serpent, the groot Meerschlang , and goes to his cabin and tells the mate to log him as having been sick. He don't want people to think he's crazy. Neither do we and neither do you, eh, Captain?'
     
                  "I looked around at the sunlit glade. The mist had vanished and a green touraco bird fluttered on the stalk of bamboo over the mound where Bruckheller lay. My report would be the same, in essence, as the others. We came, he ran, he shot, we shot, finis. And there it rests to this day. You chaps are the first to ever hear the real story."
     
                  There was a long silence as we digested what we had heard. Then someone, not Williams—he was still numb—but another man, said hesitantly, "I guess it really is like the great sea serpent, isn't it, just too much to expect the world to believe?"
     
                  Ffellowes stared at him coldly, his blue eyes like ice. "Great sea serpent, indeed, my dear man? You don't know what you're talking about! That's a totally, I mean to say, totally different matter altogether. Why, there's nothing in the least unbelievable about the great sea serpent, as I myself can attest. Nothing like it whatsoever, nothing!"
     
                  I felt good at once. The great sea serpent! Well, well, well.
     
    -
     

THE KINGS OF THE SEA
     
                  I don't remember how magic came into the conversation at the club, but it had, somehow.
     
                  "Magic means rather different things to different people. To me ..." Brigadier Donald Ffellowes, late of Her Majesty's forces, had suddenly begun talking. He generally sat, ruddy, very British and rather tired looking, on the edge of any circle. Occasionally he would add a date, a name, or simply nod, if he felt like backing up someone else's story. His own stories came at odd intervals