Settlers and Scouts: A Tale of the African Highlands

Settlers and Scouts: A Tale of the African Highlands by Herbert Strang, New Edition


CONTENTS
Illustration: “The Bengali hurled the canful at his head.”
Preface to the First Edition
Chapter 1. The Emigrants
Chapter 2. Said Mohammed, Failed B.A.
Chapter 3. In a Game-Pit
Illustration: PART OF BRITISH EAST AFRICA
Chapter 4. White Man’s Magic
Illustration: “One of the Wakamba slipped off when he was in midstream.”
Chapter 5. Juma takes to the Bush
Chapter 6. Raided by Lions
Chapter 7. John runs the Farm
Chapter 8. Hard Pressed
Chapter 9. A Rearguard Fight
Chapter 10. Driving Sheep to Market
Chapter 11. Rhinoceros and Lions
Illustration: “Ferrier raised his rifle, and brought him down with a bullet through the heart.”
Chapter 12. The Sack of the Farm
Chapter 13. Tracking the Raiders
Chapter 14. Ferrier Insists
Chapter 15. A Coup de Main
Chapter 16. Juma is Reinforced
Illustration: The Pool
Chapter 17. John’s Letter
Chapter 18. An Attack in Force
Chapter 19. Trapped
Illustration: “The hippo gave a snort, and the water around him was agitated as by an immense churn.”
Chapter 20. Shooting the Rapids
Chapter 21. A Combined Assault
Chapter 22. A Counter Stroke
Chapter 23. The Ivory
Chapter 24. Ferrier takes the Lead
Illustration: “John ordered his askaris to fire among the negroes on the left bank.”
Chapter 25. The Fight in the Swamp
Chapter 26. Back to the Farm


Preface to the First Edition
The present story completes a series of three books in which I have endeavoured to give impressions of life in the immense region known as Equatorial Africa. The scene of Tom Burnaby was laid in the centre, around the great lakes; Sambawas concerned with the western or Congo districts; Settlers and Scouts is a story of the east, more especially the magnificent highland region which seems destined to become one of the greatest provinces of the British African Empire.

The steady stream of emigration already flowing to British East Africa is bound to swell when it is more generally recognized that in the hill districts of Kenya, Naivasha, and Kisumu there are vast areas of agricultural land constituting an ideal “white man’s country.” In the following pages I have attempted to show some of the conditions under which the pioneers of emigration must work. The development of communications and the settlement of the remoter regions will soon relegate such alarums and excursions as are here described to the romantic possibilities of the past. But it will be long before the lion, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and other more or less formidable neighbours cease to be factors with which the emigrant has to reckon.

For many facts, stranger by far than fiction, concerning the wild inhabitants, human and other, of this most interesting region, I am indebted to Mr. Arkell-Hardwick’s An Ivory Trader in North Kenya and Colonel Patterson’s Man-Eaters of Tsavo, among several important works that have appeared during recent years.

It may be added that in the spelling of native names I have sometimes rather consulted the reader’s convenience than conformed strictly to rule. The name Wanderobbo, for instance, applied to an individual, is a solecism, the prefix Wa being a sign of the plural. But it seemed better to err than to afflict the reader with so uncouth a form as N’derobbo.

HERBERT STRANG.