The red-haired man was Leslie J. Tarlton. No description of British East Africa is complete without some reference to Tarlton, the Boer War veteran now known to hunters the world over because of the flourishing business he has built up in Nairobi—a part of which is equipping safari hunters with everything from food to niggers.
Tarlton and his partner, Newland, were Australians who had served in the Boer War. At its close they set out to make their fortunes somewhere in Africa. Coming to Nairobi with none too much of this world's goods but plenty of ambition and enthusiasm, they were casting about for an objective when on that morning in 1905 I stumbled upon Tarlton's iron house. The safari business into which they fell that day helped to make them prosperous men until the opening of the World War in 1914 put an end to African hunting for a time.
Tarlton afterward confessed to me that the typewriter that first attracted my attention would not write at all. Its only use was to make a noise when a prospective client came in sight. It was perhaps the first propounder in Nairobi of the modern business principle that nothing succeeds like success and it propounded no less diligently because Tarlton had not yet discovered what his post-war profession was to be. Two or three weeks after our first meeting, when I came in from the plains, my safari laden with collections to be packed in brine, Tarlton was much on the job, observing the process and assisting whenever he saw an opportunity. Finally he asked why
