Long Odds | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by Christopher Hapka, Sunnyvale, California.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT
This Project Gutenberg edition is based on the text of the story as
reprinted in the collection, "Allan's Wife and other tales."

LONG ODDS

The story which is narrated in the following pages came to me from the
lips of my old friend Allan Quatermain, or Hunter Quatermain, as we
used to call him in South Africa. He told it to me one evening when I
was stopping with him at the place he bought in Yorkshire. Shortly
after that, the death of his only son so unsettled him that he
immediately left England, accompanied by two companions, his old
fellow-voyagers, Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, and has now
utterly vanished into the dark heart of Africa. He is persuaded that a
white people, of which he has heard rumours all his life, exists
somewhere on the highlands in the vast, still unexplored interior, and
his great ambition is to find them before he dies. This is the wild quest
upon which he and his companions have departed, and from which I
shrewdly suspect they never will return. One letter only have I received
from the old gentleman, dated from a mission station high up the Tana,
a river on the east coast, about three hundred miles north of Zanzibar.
In it he says that they have gone through many hardships and
adventures, but are alive and well, and have found traces which go far
towards making him hope that the results of their wild quest may be a
"magnificent and unexampled discovery." I greatly fear, however, that
all he has discovered is death; for this letter came a long while ago, and
nobody has heard a single word of the party since. They have totally
vanished.
It was on the last evening of my stay at his house that he told the
ensuing story to me and Captain Good, who was dining with him. He
had eaten his dinner and drunk two or three glasses of old port, just to
help Good and myself to the end of the second bottle. It was an unusual
thing for him to do, for he was a most abstemious man, having

conceived, as he used to say, a great horror of drink from observing its
effects upon the class of colonists--hunters, transport riders and
others--amongst whom he had passed so many years of his life.
Consequently the good wine took more effect on him than it would
have done on most men, sending a little flush into his wrinkled cheeks,
and making him talk more freely than usual.
Dear old man! I can see him now, as he went limping up and down the
vestibule, with his grey hair sticking up in scrubbing-brush fashion,