"PUNDIT BAGH SHOT INTO THE AIR A QUIVERING MASS OF GOLD AND BRONZE IN THE SUNLIGHT."
The dogs, eager in bloodthirst, dashed in, snapping at the tiger's rumps, and, as he whirled, sprang at his face. One blow of a paw, like the cut of a gold scimitar, and a dog landed ten feet away—pulp.
A sigh of relief escaped from Finnerty as the dogs slunk back and Pundit Bagh, seemingly none the worse, crouched again for battle.
"That is their way," Mahadua whispered; "they seek to cut Bagh in his vitals behind, while in front others spit poison in his eyes to blind him; the white froth that spouts from their mouths when they fight is poison."
Blood was dripping from the bison's neck as he faced about, but the snap at his neck had not discouraged him; his actions showed that he would battle to the end. The taste of blood had broken the Pundit's debonair nonchalance. Before he had been like a cat playing with a mouse; he had purred and kinked his long tail in satirical jerks. Now he lashed his sides or beat the ground in anger. From his throat issued a snarling "W-o-u-g-h-n-ng!" Again he waited for his antagonist's charge, slipping to one side as the black mass came hurtling toward him to swipe at the eyes, cutting clean away an ear and leaving red-blooded slits from cheek to shoulder, his damaged paw once more suffering from contact with that hard skull.
The dogs had edged in as the two clashed, but dropped back to their waiting line as tiger and bison faced each other again, the latter shaking his massive head and pawing fretfully, as if angered at his enemy's slipping away when they came to close quarters. Something of this must have stirred his own strategy, for, as he thundered in a charge, he swept his head sidewise as the tiger swerved, catching Stripes a crashing blow, the sharp incurve of the horn all that saved him from being ripped wide open. Half stunned, he was pinned to earth as the bull swung short to a fresh attack; and, seeing this, taking it for the end, the dogs, with yaps of fury, closed in, snapping with their cutting teeth at flesh, wherever found.
With a bellow of rage, the bull backed away three paces, and a dog that had gripped his neck was ground to death against the earth. Pundit Bagh thrust his body up through a dozen dogs that clung like red ants, and, whether in chivalry or blind anger, the bull, with lowered head, rushed on the yapping, snarling, lancing pack, at the first thrust his daggerlike horns piercing a dog. The outstretched black neck, the taut, extended spine almost brushing Pundit's nose, flashed into his tiger mind the killing grip. Forgotten were the dogs in the blind call of blood lust. The wide-spread jaws crunched astride the neck, and, with a wrench that he had learned from his mother when a cub, the bull was thrown, the dogs pouncing upon him with hunger in their hearts.
At the first treacherous snap of the tiger's jaws, Finnerty had acted. With the subservience of a medium, at the word "Now!" Lord Victor pressed the gunstock against his shoulder; his head drooped till his eye ranged the barrels; and, penetrating the booming thump of his heart, a calming voice was saying: "Take your time; aim behind the tiger's shoulder. Stead-d-y, man!" His finger pulled heavily on the trigger, the gun roared, and a sledge-hammer blow on his shoulder all but sprawled him; then the gun was snatched from his hands. Half dazed, he saw Finnerty send another bullet into something. There was a "Click! Snap!" as two fresh shells were slipped into the barrels, and again the 8-bore thundered twice.
Springing to his feet, Gilfain saw a great mass of gold and brown flat to earth, and the black rump of a bison bull galloping off into the jungle. Then his fingers were being crushed in the huge hand of Finnerty, who was saying: "My dear boy, a corking shot—straight through the heart; he never moved! I shot two or three dogs!"
"Demme!" was all the pumped-out Lord Victor could gasp, as he sank back to the knob of earth he had been sitting on.
"One never knows," Finnerty said, shoving a fresh cartridge into the 8-bore, "if a tiger is really dead till he's skinned. Come on; we'll look."
Mahadua, saying, "Have patience, sahib," threw a stone, hitting Pundit Bagh fair on the head. There was no movement. Then, striding in front, Finnerty prodded the fallen monarch with his gun muzzle. He was indeed dead.
"I got a couple of those vermin, anyway," and Finnerty pointed to two dogs the big 8-bore bullet had nearly blown to pieces.
Mahadua, on his knees, was muttering: "Salaam, Pundit Bagh!" and patting the huge head that held the fast-glazing yellow globes set in black-rimmed spectacles. There was a weird reflex of jungle reverence in his eyes as, rising, he said, addressing Finnerty: "Sahib, Pundit Bagh did not kill men nor women nor children; this was the way he fought." And then, when there were no eyes upon him, he surreptitiously plucked three long bristles from the tiger's moustache, slipping them into his jacket pocket to be kept as a charm against jungle devils.
Lord Victor had come down the hill, dead to sensation; he had walked like one in a dream. The fierce press of contained excitement had numbed his brain; now he loosened to the erratic mood of a child; he laughed idiotically, while tears of excited joy rolled down his pink cheeks; he babbled incoherent, senseless words; he wanted to kiss Finnerty, Pundit Bagh, or something, or somebody; he would certainly give Mahadua a hundred rupees; he fell to unlacing and lacing his shoes in nervous dementia. What would the earl say? What would the fellows at the London clubs say?
Finnerty had a tape out, and, passing his notebook to Swinton, he, with Mahadua at one end of the tape, rapidly ruled off the following measurements:
| Feet | Inches | |
| From point of nose to tip of tail | 10 | |
| Length of tail | 2 | 10 |
| Girth behind shoulders | 4 | 4 |
| Girth of head | 3 | 4 |
| Girth of forearm | 1 | 10 |
| Height at shoulder | 3 | 6 |
"There!" And Finnerty put his tape in his pocket. "Pundit Bagh is a regal one. I feel sorry we had to shoot him in just that way; but the dogs spoiled a good fight. Fancy your getting a skin like that to take back, Lord Victor—it's luck! And remember, gentlemen, we must spread this mandate that a bull bison with one ear goes free of the gun, for he was a right-couraged one."
"Rather!" Lord Victor ejaculated. "To-night we'll drink a toast in fizz to the one-eared bull—a thoroughbred gentleman!"
"We'll need the elephant up to pad this tiger," Finnerty said. Mahadua, who was sent to bring on Raj Bahadar, had not been gone two minutes when from their back trail came, upwind, the shrill trumpeting of two elephants, and mingling with this was the harsh honk of a conch shell.
"That's Moti, or wild elephants tackling Raj Bahadar," Finnerty declared. "I must get back. The tiger will be all right here for a little—those dogs won't come back—and I'll send Mahadua and the elephant after him."
PART THREE
Chapter XIII
It was a stirring scene that greeted the three sahibs on their arrival at the conflict. Like a family of monkeys the natives decorated the tree, while below was Burra Moti giving lusty battle to the tusker. Either out of chivalry or cowardice, Raj Bahadar was backing up, refusing to obey the prod of his mahout's goad, and charge.
As Moti came at the bull like a battering-ram he received her on his forehead, the impact sounding like the crash of two meeting freight cars, and she, vindictively cunning, with a quick twist of her head, gashed him in the neck with a long tusk.
"Come down out of there, you women of the sweeper caste!" Finnerty commanded. The natives dropped to the ground. One of them, uncoiling his rawhide rope, darted in behind Moti, noosed a lifted foot, and ran back with the trailing end.
Raj Bahadar, discouraged by the thrust in his neck, wheeled and fled, pursued by Moti, the native lassooer, clinging to the trailing noose, being whipped about like a wind-tossed leaf. With a shout Finnerty followed, the others joining in the chase.
A thick growth of timber checked Raj Bahadar, and, as Moti slackened her pace, the man with the rawhide darted around a tree with the rope; Finnerty and the others grasped the end, the rawhide creaked and stretched, and as Moti plunged forward her hind leg was suddenly yanked into the air, bringing her down. Another man sprang in to noose a foreleg, but Moti was too quick for him; she was up to stand for a little sullen meditation.
The native flashed in and out, almost within reach of her trunk, trying to make her raise a forefoot that he might noose it and slip his rawhide about a tree, when Moti, tethered fore and aft, would be helpless.
"Be careful!" Finnerty called as the noose man slipped in and flicked Moti on the knee with no result but the curling up of her trunk, as if out of harm's way. Again he danced in, and as the long trunk shot out like a snake darting from a coil he sprang beneath the big head, giving a laugh of derision; but Moti struck sidewise with a forefoot, and with a sickening crunch the man dropped ten feet away.
Uttering a squeal of rage, the elephant whipped about and charged back, the rawhide noose breaking like a piece of twine. Finnerty was fair in her path, but with a grunt, as if to say, "Get out of the way, friend," she brushed by him, and would have gone straight off to the jungle had not a man, in a sudden folly of fright, darted from behind a tree only to stumble and fall before he had taken a dozen steps. Down on her knees went Moti, seeking to spear the fallen man with her tusks, but at the first thrust one went either side of his body, and, being long, the great, crushing head did not quite reach him. Grasping both pillars of this ivory archway, the man wriggled out and escaped as Moti, pulling her tusks out of the soft earth, rose, cocked her ears, drove a whistle of astonishment through her trunk, and then scuttled off to the jungle.
"We won't follow her up," Finnerty declared; "the noosing has flustered the old girl and we'll not get near her again to-day; she'd keep going if she heard us and we'd lose her forever up in the hills."
Mahadua advised: "If the mahout will tickle Bahadar with his hook so that he speak now and then, perhaps Moti, being lonesome and remembering of cakes and home, will come back like an angry woman who has found peace."
Thinking this a good plan, Finnerty gave the mahout orders to entice Moti in if she came about. A dozen men were sent to bring the tiger, slung from a pole, to the bungalow; they would bring back food to the others.
Telling the natives he would join them in the hunt next day, Finnerty and his companions mounted their horses to ride back.
Coming to the road that wound through the cool sal forest, they saw Prince Ananda riding toward them.
"What luck?" he greeted when they met. "I heard that an elephant had taken to the jungle." He wheeled his Arab with them, adding: "You look done up. Come along to the palace and have a cooling drink."
Lord Victor ranged his horse alongside Ananda's Arab as they started, but as they drew near the palace grounds Darpore halted his horse, and, pointing his hunting crop across the broad valley below in which lay the town, said: "Yonder was the road along which, so many centuries ago, Prince Sakya Singha's mother came when he was born here in the Lumbini Garden."
Swinton, in whose mind the prince was arraigned as a vicar of the devil—at least as a seditious prince which, to a British officer, was analogous—felt the curious subtlety of this speech; for, sitting his beautiful Arab, outlined against the giant sal trees, their depths holding the mysteries of centuries, he had an Oriental background that made his pose compelling.
Lord Victor moved a little to one side, as if his volatile spirits felt a dampening, the depression of a buried past; and Prince Ananda, turning his Arab, drew Swinton along to his side by saying: "Have you come in contact with the cleavage of religious fanaticism in India, captain?"
"My experience was only of the army; there the matter of Hindu or Mussulman is now better understood and better arranged," Swinton answered cautiously as he and Ananda rode forward side by side.
The captain was puzzled. Training had increased the natural bent of his mind toward a suspicious receptivity where he felt there was necessity. He had decided that the prince, with Oriental lethargy, never acted spontaneously—that there was something behind every move he made; his halt, back on the road, was evidently to make a change from Lord Victor to himself in their alignment. Temporarily the captain fancied that the prince might wish to draw from him some account of the preceding night's adventure. Indeed, as a Raj horse had probably been killed, Ananda could not have missed hearing of the accident.
It was Lord Victor's voice that stirred these thoughts to verbal existence. "I say, Prince Ananda," he suddenly asked, "did you hear that my mentor had been devoured by a tiger last night?"
As if startled into a remembrance, Ananda said: "Sorry, captain, I forgot to ask if anything did happen you last night. My master of horse reported this morning that your pony was found with a broken leg at the foot of a cliff; then I heard that you had gone off with the major, so knew you were all right. You see, well"—the prince spoke either in genuine or assumed diffidence—"as it was a Raj pony that came to grief I couldn't very well speak of it; that is, knowing that you were all right."
"When I heard it," Gilfain broke in, "remembering what you had said about the hunting leopard, I was deuced well bashed, I assure you."
"Was there—anything—in the report of—a tiger trying to maul you?" the prince asked, and Swinton, tilting his helmet, found the luminous black eyes reading his face.
But Swinton could have been plotting murder behind those "farthing eyes" for all they betrayed as he answered: "I don't know what frightened the animal; he suddenly shied and I was thrown out, coming a cropper on my head which put me to sleep for a few minutes. When I came to the pony and cart had disappeared and there was nothing for it but go back to the major's bungalow for the night."
"Then there was nothing in the tiger story," the prince commented.
"I saw no tiger, anyway," Swinton declared, and Finnerty chuckled inwardly, for, like the captain, he had been mystified by Darpore's sudden interest in the latter.
The prince had presented something akin to a caste aloofness toward Swinton; now the change had tensed Finnerty's perceptions so that he took cognizance of things that ordinarily would have passed as trivial. He saw Ananda deliberately ride past the road that would have taken them to the magnificent courtyard entrance of the palace, the beautiful red rubble road that wound its way through crotons, oleanders, and hibiscus around the fairy Lake of the Golden Coin to cross the marble-arched bridge. Now they were following a road that led through the zoo to the back entrance. As they came to a massive teakwood gate, from the left of which stretched away in a crescent sweep a wall of cages—the first one at the very gatepost holding a fiend, a man-killing black leopard—the major pressed his mount close to the rump of Swinton's horse, upon the right of whom rode Prince Ananda. A guard saluted, an attendant swung the teakwood barrier inward, and while it was still but half open Ananda pressed forward, his horse carrying Swinton's with him into a holocaust of lightning-like happenings.
Swinton turned toward the prince at some word, and at that instant the latter's horse swerved against his mount, as if stung by a spur on the outside; a black arm, its paw studded with glittering claws, flashed through the bars of the cage with a sweep like a scimitar's, striking Swinton full in the chest, the curved claws hooking through his khaki coat and sweeping him half out of the saddle toward the iron bars against which he would be ripped to pieces in a second. With an oath, Finnerty's whip came down on his horse's flank, and the Irishman's body was driven like a wedge between the leopard and his prey; the thrusting weight tore the claws through the cloth of Swinton's coat, and, still clutching viciously, they slashed Finnerty across the chest, a gash the width of his chin showing they had all but torn through his throat.
Swinton pulled himself into the saddle and looked back at the major's blood-smeared chin and on beyond to the sinister black creature that stood up on his hind legs against the bars of his cage thrusting a forepaw through playfully as though it were only a bit of feline sport. He shuddered at the devilishness of the whole thing that looked so like another deliberate attempt. The prince would know that that black fiend, true to his jungle instincts, would be waiting in hiding behind the brick wall of his cage for a slash at any warm-blooded creature rounding the corner. They were a fighting pair, this black, murderous leopard and the prince. Finnerty was checking the blood flow on his chin with a handkerchief; his eyes, catching Swinton's as they turned from the leopard, were full of fierce anger.
There had been an outburst of grating calls and deep, reverberating roars as leopards and tigers, roused by the snarl of the black demon as he struck, gave vent to their passion.
As if stirred to ungovernable anger by the danger his friends had incurred through the gateman's fault, Ananda turned on the frightened man, and, raising his whip, brought it down across his back. Twice the lash fell, and two welts rose in the smooth black skin; this assault accompanied by a torrent of abuse that covered chronologically the native's ancestry back to his original progenitor, a jungle pig. Ananda's face, livid from this physical and mental assault, smoothed out with a look of contrite sorrow as he apologised to his companions.
"I'm awfully sorry, major; that fool nearly cost us a life by frightening my horse with his frantic efforts to open the gate. He's an opium eater, and must have been beating that leopard with his staff to have made him so suddenly vicious. Your coat is ripped, captain; are you wounded?"
"No, thanks!" Swinton answered dryly.
"You are, major."
"Nothing much—a scratch. I'll have to be careful over blood poisoning, that's all."
"Yes," the prince said, "I'll have my apothecary apply an antiseptic."
As they wound between a spurting fountain and a semicircle of iron-barred homes, a monkey dropped his black, spiderlike body from an iron ring in the ceiling, and, holding by a coil in the end of his tail, swung back and forth, head down, howling dismally. Bedlam broke forth in answer to this discordant wail.
"Delightful place!" Finnerty muttered as he rode at Swinton's elbow.
"Inferno and the archfiend!" And Swinton nodded toward the back of Prince Ananda, who rode ahead.
In the palace dispensary Finnerty brushed the apothecary to one side and treated his slashed chin with iodine; a rough treatment that effectually cleaned the cut at the bottom, which was the bone.
They did not tarry long over the champagne, and were soon in the saddle again. Finnerty asked his companions to ride on to his bungalow for an early dinner. Lord Victor declined, declaring he was clean bowled, but insisted that the captain should accept. As for himself, he was going to bed, being ghastly tired.
As Swinton and the major sat puffing their cheroots on the verandah after dinner, the latter gave a despairing cry of "Great Kuda!" as his eyes caught sight of the Banjara swinging up the road, evidently something of import flogging his footsteps. "We shall now be laughed at for not having bagged that tiger yesterday." Finnerty chuckled.
But the Lumbani was in no hurry to disburse whatever was in his mind, for he folded his black blanket on the verandah at the top step and sat down, salaaming in a most grave manner first. Finnerty and Swinton smoked and talked in English, leaving the tribesman to his own initiative. Presently he asked: "Is the young sahib who shot my dog present?"
Relief softened the austere cast of his bony face when Finnerty answered "No."
"It is as well," the Lumbani said, "for the young have not control of their tongues. But the sahib"—and the Banjara nodded toward Swinton, his eyes coming back to Finnerty's face—"is a man of discretion, is it not so, huzoor?"
To this observation the major agreed.
"And the sahib will not repeat what I tell?"
The Lumbani rubbed his long, lean hands up and down the length of his staff as though it were a fairy wand to ward off evil; his black, hawklike eyes swept the compound, the verandah, as much of the bungalow interior as they could; then pitching his voice so that it carried with wonderful accuracy just to the ears of the two men, he said: "There was a man beaten to-day at the gate of the tiger garden."
Neither of the sahibs answered, and he proceeded: "The gateman who was beaten is a brother to me; not a blood brother, sahib, but a tribe brother, for he is a Banjara of the Lumbani caste."
"By Jove!" The major clamped his jaws close after this involuntary exclamation and waited.
"Yes, sahib"—the Lumbani had noticed with satisfaction the major's start—"my brother has shown me the welts on his shoulder, such as are raised on a cart bullock, but he is not a bullock, being a Banjara."
There was a little silence, the native turning over in his mind something else he wished to say, trying to discover first what impression he had made, his shrewd eyes searching Finnerty's face for a sign. Suddenly, as if taking a plunge, he asked: "Does the sahib, who is a man, approve that the servant be beaten like a dog—even though the whip lay in the hands of a rajah?"
Finnerty hesitated. It is not well to give encouragement to a native against the ruling powers, whether they be black or white.
"And he was not at fault," the Banjara added persuasively; "he did not frighten the pony—it was the rajah's spur, for my brother saw blood on the skin of the horse where the spur had cut."
"Why didn't he open the gate wide; had he orders not to do so?" Finnerty asked quickly.
"Sahib, if the rajah had passed orders such as that he would not have struck a Banjara like a dog, lest there be telling of the orders; but the gate had been injured so that it would not open as always, and the tender did not know it."
"But the rajah did not know we'd be coming along at that time," the major parried.
"As to time, one day matters no more than another. The rajah would have invited you through that gate some time. But he did know you were up in the jungle, and rode forth to meet you."
"It was but a happening," Finnerty asserted, with the intent of extracting from the Lumbani what further evidence he had.
"When one thing happens many times it is more a matter of arrangement than of chance," the Banjara asserted.
"I don't understand," Finnerty declared.
"There is a window in the palace, sahib, directly in front of the gate, and it has been a matter of pastime for the rajah to sit at that window when somebody against whom he had ill will would be admitted and clawed by that black devil."
"Impossible!"
"It is not a new thing, sahib; my brother who was beaten knows of this."
Finnerty stepped into his room, and returning placed a couple of rupees in the ready palm of the Banjara, saying: "Your brother has been beaten because of us, so give him this."
The Lumbani rolled the silver in the fold of his loin cloth, and, indicating Swinton with his staff, said: "The sahib should not go at night to the hill, neither here nor there"—he swept an arm in the direction of the palace—"for sometimes that evil leopard is abroad at night."
Finnerty laughed.
The Banjara scowled: "As to that, the black leopard has had neither food nor water to-day, and if the sahibs sit up over the pool in Jadoo Nala they may see him drink."
"We'd see a jungle pig coming out of the fields, or a muntjac deer with his silly little bark, perhaps," Finnerty commented in quiet tolerance.
"Such do drink at the pool, but of these I am not speaking. The young man being not with you to disarrange matters, you might happen upon something of interest, sahib," the Banjara declared doggedly.
"We are not men to chase a phantom—to go and sit at Jadoo Pool because a herdsman has fallen asleep on the back of a buffalo and had a dream."
Behind a faint smile the Lumbani digested this. "Very well, sahib," he exclaimed presently, with definite determination; "I will speak. When my brother was beaten the dust was shaken from his ears and he has heard. Beside the big gate Darna Singh and his sister, the princess, talked to-day, and the speech was of those who would meet in secret at the pool to-night."
"Who meet there?"
"The rajah's name was spoken, sahib."
"How knew Darna Singh this?"
"There be always teeth that can be opened with a silver coin. Now," and the Lumbani gathered up his black blanket, throwing it over his shoulder, "I go to my herd, for there is a she-buffalo heavy in calf and to-night might increase the number of my stock."
"Have patience, Lumbani," Finnerty commanded, and as the Banjara turned to stand in waiting he added to Swinton: "What do you think, captain—we might learn something? But there's Lord Victor; he'll expect you home."
"I'll drop him a note saying we're going to sit up over the Jadoo Pool and to not worry if I don't get home to-night."
Finnerty brought pencil and paper, and when the note was written handed it to the Banjara, saying: "For the young sahib at the bungalow, and if he receives it you will be paid eight annas to-morrow."
The herdsman put the note in his loin cloth and strode away. At the turn where Swinton had been thrown from his dogcart he dropped the note over the cliff, explaining to the sky his reasons: "A hunt is spoiled by too many hunters. It is not well that the young sahib reads that they go to Jadoo Pool—it was not so meant of the gods—and as to the service, I have eaten no salt of the sahib's, having not yet been paid."
The old chap was naturally sure that Swinton had written in the note that the young sahib was to join them at the pool.
As he plodded downhill he formulated his excuse for nondelivery of the note. It would be that the she-buffalo had demanded his immediate care, and in all the worry and work it had been forgotten and then lost. It was well to have a fair excuse to tender a sahib who put Punjabi wrestlers on their backs.
Chapter XIV
After the Banjara had gone, Finnerty said: "That's the gentle Hindu for you—mixes his mythology and data; he's found out something, I believe, and worked his fancy for the melodrama of the black leopard stalking abroad at night."
"I'm here to follow up any possible clue that may lead to the discovery of anything," Swinton observed.
"Besides," the major added, "I meant to take you for a sit up over that pool some night; many an interesting hour I've spent sitting in a machan over a pool watching jungle dwellers. There's a salt lick in Jadoo Nala, and even bison, shy as they are, have been known to come down out of the big sal forest to that pool. Nobody shoots over it, so that entices the animals; but Prince Ananda has a roomy machan there with an electric light in it. I suppose one of his German chaps put it in, for he has an electric lighting plant under the palace, also an ice-making machine. We'd better get a couple of guns fixed up in the way of defence, for it will be dark in an hour or so."
He went to his room and returned with a gun in each hand, saying: "Fine-sighted rifles will be little use; here's a double-barrelled 12-bore Paradox, with some ball cartridges. We won't be able to see anything beyond twenty yards, and she'll shoot true for that distance; I'll take this 10-bore. Now we'll go over into the jungle and get some night sights."
Wonderingly Swinton accompanied Finnerty, and just beyond the compound they came to a halt beneath a drooping palm, from a graceful branch of which a long, pear-shaped nest swung gently back and forth in the evening breeze. "This is the nest of the baya, the weaver bird; it's a beautiful bit of architecture," Finnerty said as he tapped with gentle fingers on the tailored nest.
A fluttering rustle within, followed by the swooping flight of a bird, explained his motive. "I didn't want the little cuss to beat her eggs to pieces in fright when I put my hand in," he added softly as he thrust two fingers up the tunnellike entrance to the nest, drawing them forth with a little lump of soft clay between their tips in which was imbedded a glowworm. "That will make a most excellent night sight," the major explained; "there should be two or three more in there."
"What is the idea of this most extraordinarily clever thing?" Swinton asked.
"It may be food in cold storage, but the natives say it's a matter of lighting up the house. At any rate, I've always found these glowworms alive and ready to flash their little electric bulbs."
As he gathered two more nature incandescents Finnerty indicated the beauty of the nest. The insects were placed in the hall, or tunnel entrance, and above this, to one side, like a nursery, was the breeding nest, the whole structure being hung by a network of long grass and slender roots from the branch of the palm.
As they went back to the bungalow, Finnerty, as if switched from the machinations of Prince Ananda by the touch of nature's sweet handicraft in the nest, fell into a mood so poetically gentle that Swinton could hardly subdue a sense of incongruity in its association with the huge-framed speaker. There was no doubt whatever about the pleasing thrill of sincerity in his Irish voice as he said, "One of my enjoyments is the study of bird nidification. They run true to breeding—which is more than we do. On that"—he pointed to a giant teakwood monarch that had fallen perhaps a century before and was draped with a beautiful shroud of lichen and emerald-green moss that peeped from between bracken and fern—"is the nest of a little yellow-bellied 'fly-catcher warbler' that is built of brilliant green moss lined with snowy cotton-silk from the Simul tree. See that fellow?" and Finnerty pointed to a little scarlet-and-black bird, its wings splashed with grey and gold, sitting on a limb. "That's a Minivet; she covers her nest with lichens so that on a lichen-covered limb it looks like a knot."
"Tremendously wise are Nature's children," Swinton contributed.
"Generally," Finnerty answered thoughtfully: "sometimes, though, her children do such foolish things. For instance, the Frog-mouth is just as cunning about hiding her nest, covering it with scraps of bark and moss to make it look like the limb of a tree, lining it inside with down from her own breast; but there's a screw loose somewhere, for she lays two eggs and the nest is never big enough to contain more than one bird, so the other one is crowded out to die."
They were at the bungalow now, and saying that he and Swinton must have a day some time among the birds Finnerty adjusted the night sights. With a slim rubber band he fastened a match across the double barrels at the front sight and beneath this placed a glowworm.
As Finnerty and Swinton went by a jungle path up the hill, the oncoming night was draping the forest with heavy gloom.
"We'll get within sight of the palace by this path," the major advised, "and then we'll skirt around the Lake of the Golden Coin to see if there are indications of things unusual."
When they came out on the plateau they were on the road that wound about the palace outside of the garden wall, and as they passed the teakwood gate it looked forbiddingly sombre outlined against the palace light. Swinton shuddered, and through his mind flashed a curious thought of how so much treacherous savagery could exist in the mind of a man capable of soft-cultured speech, and who was of a pleasing grace of physical beauty.
They circled the Lake of the Golden Coin till they faced the marble bridge; here they stood in the shadow of a mango thicket. The moon, now climbing to shoot its rays through the feathery tops of the sal trees, picked out the palace in blue-grey tones, the absence of lights, the pillared architecture, giving it the suggestion of a vast mausoleum.
Finnerty placed his hand on Swinton's arm, the clasp suggesting he was to listen. Straining his ear, he heard the measured military tramp of men; then their forms loomed grotesquely in the struggling moonlight as they crossed the marble bridge coming from the palace; even in that uncertain light the military erectness of the figures, the heavy, measured tramp told Swinton they were Prussians. Finnerty and the captain hurried away, and as they passed around the lake end to the road a figure, or perhaps two, indefinite, floated across a patch of moonlight like a drift of smoke.
The major spread his nostrils. "Attar of rose! Did you get it, Swinton?"
"Think I did."
"There's only one woman on this hill whose clothes are so saturated with attar."
"Ananda's princess? What would she be doing out here at night?"
As they moved along, Finnerty chuckled: "What are we doing up here? What were the Prussians doing in the prince's palace? What is Marie doing here in Darpore? I tell you, captain, I wouldn't give much for that girl's chances if the princess thinks she's a rival. The princess comes from a Rajput family that never stopped at means to an end."
"It would suggest that there is really something on to-night. Doesn't Boelke's bungalow lie up in that direction?"
"Yes; and I think it was two women who passed; probably it was Marie's ayah whom the Banjara referred to when he said there were always teeth that could be opened with a silver coin. Prince Ananda has not been seen much with the girl, but the princess may have discovered that he meets her at the pool. It would be a safe trysting place so far as chance discovery is concerned, for natives never travel that path at night; they believe that a phantom leopard lives in the cave from which the salt stream issues. This is the way," he added, turning to the left along a path that dipped down in gentle gradient to the beginning of Jadoo Nala, which in turn led on to a valley that reached the great plain.
Along this valley lay a trail, stretching from the forest-covered hills to the plains, that had been worn by the feet of great jungle creatures—bison, tiger, even elephants, in their migratory trips, Finnerty told Swinton, and sometimes they wandered up Jadoo Nala for a lick at the salt, knowing that they were never disturbed.
There was some bitterness in the major's low-pitched voice as he said: "Jadoo Pool would be an ideal spot for pothunters who come out here to kill big game and sit up in a machan over a drinking place to blaze away at bison or tiger, generally only wounding the animal in the bad night light; if it's a tiger he goes off into the jungle, and, crazed by the pain of a festering sore, will kill on sight, and finally, his strength and speed reduced by the weakening wound, will turn to killing the easiest kind of game—man; becomes a man-eater. I once shot a rogue elephant that had killed a dozen people, and found that the cause of his madness was a maggot-filled hole in his skull that had been made by a ball from an 8-bore in the hands of a juvenile civil servant, fired at night."
Finnerty's monologue was cut short by the screeching bell of a deer. "A chital at the pool; something, perhaps a leopard hunting his supper, has startled him," he advised.
They moved forward softly, their feet scarce making a rustle on the smooth path, and as they came to the roots of a graceful pipal that stretched its lean arms out over the pool, from the opposite bank the startled cry of the deer again rent the brooding stillness as he bounded away, his little hoofs ringing on the stony hill.
A light bamboo ladder, strapped to the pipal, led to a machan that was hidden by a constructed wall of twigs and grass, through which were little openings that afforded a view of the pool.
As they reached the machan, Finnerty said: "As we are here to hear and see only, I suppose that even if Pundit Bagh comes we let him go free, eh?"
"Yes; I really don't want to kill anything while I'm in Darpore; that is, unless it's necessary to take a pot shot at a Hun, and I have a feeling that we're going to see something worth while—that Banjara is no fool."
Then the two men settled back on the springy, woven floor of the machan to a wait in the mysterious night of a tropical jungle. Stilled, the noise of their own movements hushed, the silence of the mighty forest was oppressive; it suggested vastness, a huge void, as though they sat in a gigantic cave, themselves the only living thing within. A dried leaf rustling to earth sounded like the falling of a large body; the drip of dew-drops on the leaf carpet was heard because of the dead stillness; a belated nightjar, one of those mysterious sailors of the night air, swept acres the pool with his sad cry, "Chyeece—chyeece!" Then the stillness.
Swinton, his ear tuned to the outer distances of the void, caught a soft faint rub-a-dub, rub-a-dub! that drifted lazily up from a village in the plain, where some native thrummed idly on a tom-tom or his wife pounded grain in a clay mortar. Then something rustled the leaves just where the little streamlet flowed sluggishly from the cave to the pool, and something that was a hare or a mouse-deer slipped across the open space upon which the moon swept its soft light. To the left a startled "bhar-ha-ha!" from the bank above the pool was followed by a tattoo of tiny stamping hoofs as a muntjac, frightened by the mouse-deer, gave this first evidence of his own approach; then he bounded away, leaving stillness to take his place.
The boom of a gun sounded drowsily from down in the plains, some native, sitting up in a machan to guard his jowari or sugar cane, had fired his old muzzle-loader to frighten away greedy jungle pigs or bison.
Swinton found the drowsiness of the brooding jungle creeping into his frame; with difficulty he kept from sleep. He knew enough of jungle watching to know that he dare not smoke; the telltale odour of burning tobacco would leave them indeed in their solitude. And there was the thought that something was to happen, some mysterious thing to eventuate; the Banjara had not sent them there to see deer drinking at the pool or even to feast their eyes on bigger game.
What was it? What was it? His head drooped toward his chest; dreamily he heard the soft rustle of something close; half consciously he raised his heavy lids to gaze into two big round orbs that blazed with ruby light. On the point of calling out, he saw a pair of white wings spread; there was an almost silent swoop, and that night hunter, the great horned owl, swept away. He felt the pressure of Finnerty's elbow; it was a silent laugh.
For five minutes the unruffled pool mirrored the moon in placid silence; it lay beneath them like some jewel, a moonstone on a deep green cloth. Where the stream trickled in and out of ruts and holes left in the muddy shore by drinking animals the water gleamed like scattered pearls.
Suddenly there was a crash of breaking bamboos, followed by the heavy breathing of large animals and the shuffling of many feet. Then a herd of bison—two bulls, a few cows, and two calves—less cautious in their enormous strength, swept over the hill brow of the farther bank; there they checked and examined the pool. A big cow, followed by two others and the calves, clambered down to the water, and the scraping of their rough tongues against the crusted salt lick could be heard. One bull, his high wither with its massive hump and enormous head denoting his sex even in the transient, vibrating shimmers of moonlight the swaying branches wove into the heavy gloom, stood on guard, his big ears flapping from side to side to catch every sound of danger. The other bull, as if depending on the sentry, slid down the bank, took a hasty drink, and returned; then the cows, with their calves, went up from the water, and the herd melted like shadows into the gloomed sal forest.
Swinton was wide awake now; the majestic bison, the faithful bull on guard lest a tiger creep up on the calves, was a sight worth an hour or two of vigil.
Finnerty's head leaned toward Swinton as he whispered: "Gad! I wish I dared smoke." Then, with a smothered chuckle: "If I had turned on the electric it would have been a sight. I wonder if the current is on; we might need it if there's a shindy."
Like an echo of the major's whisper a sound floated up from the heavy pall of darkness that lay beneath the pipal; it might have been the sniff of a honey badger, the inquisitive, faint woof of a bear, or a muttered word. His hand resting on Swinton's arm in a tense grip, Finnerty strained his ears to define the curious sense he had that some one was stealthily moving beneath them. Once he put a hand on the top rung of the bamboo ladder; it vibrated as though some one leaned against it or had commenced to ascend. He slipped the butt of his 10-bore forward, ready for a handy, silent push of defence. But still, he thought, if it were Prince Ananda to meet somebody he would wait below. With a pang, Finnerty realised who the somebody that the prince must meet so secretly would be.
A little slipping sound as of a foot higher up on the path came to the listeners' ears; there was the tinkle-clink of a pebble rolling to the stones below; the rustling push of a body passing from beneath the pipal and along the mud bank of the pool. Then Finnerty saw, for a second, an outlined figure where the moon fell upon the pearllike cups of water; and the straight, athletic Rajput swing betrayed that it was Darna Singh. Then he was swallowed up in the shadow that lay heavy toward the cave.
A cicada started his shrill piping in a neighbouring tree, awakening several of his kind, and the hissing hum, raspingly monotonous, filled their ears. Suddenly it was drowned by droning English words that came floating up from below, smothered to indistinctness.
"It is the prince," Finnerty thought.
Then there were odd catches of a woman's voice. Distinctly the major heard: "No, I cannot." The man's tones had a wavering drawl, as though he pleaded. More than once the word "love," with a little fierce intonation, came to the listener. The woman had uttered words that, patched together out of their fragmentary hearing, told that she, or some one, would go away the next day.
A low, purring note carried to the machan from the cave mouth.
Turning his head cautiously, lest the machan creak, Finnerty, holding his eyes on the trickling stream where it splashed into light, dread in his heart, saw a shadow creep toward the pool, its progress marked by the blotting out of the pearllike spots of moonlit water; then the shadow was lost, and next he heard the pushing pad of velvet paws upon the leaf-covered ground just beyond the pipal. Finnerty knew. Only a tiger or a leopard stalked like that. Now the approaching animal had stopped. There was no moving shadow, no faint rustle of leaves; the thing was eyeing the pool—looking for something to kill by its brink. Below, the voices still droned, their owners unconscious of the yellow cat eyes that perhaps even then watched them in desire.
To Finnerty came with full horror a memory of the Banjara's words: "See the black leopard drink at the pool to-night."
Silently shifting his 10-bore till its muzzle ranged the side along which the thing crept, he uncovered the glowworm, and a little speck of luminous light showed that it was still alive.
Swinton, who sat facing the other way, feeling that there was something stirring, drew his gun across his knee.
A minute, two minutes—they seemed years to Finnerty—then he heard, deeper in the jungle, a bush swish as if it had been pushed, and in relief he muttered: "The brute must have seen my movement and has gone away."
For a full minute of dread suspense the silence held, save for the rasping cicada and a droning voice beneath; then, from beyond where those below stood, some noise came out of the gloom—it might have been a small branch falling or the scamper of a startled jungle rat. Holding his eyes on the spot, Finnerty saw two round balls of light gleam—yellow green, as if tiny mirrors reflected the moonlight. They disappeared, then glowed again; they rose and fell. With a chill at his heart he knew that the beast, with devilish cunning, had circled, and now approached from the side farthest from the machan. Swinging his gun, with a prayer that the current was on, he turned the electric button; a splash of white light cut the jungle gloom, and where his eyes searched was outlined in strong relief, crouched for a spring, a black leopard. Turned up to the sudden glare, ghastly in the white light, was the face of Lord Victor; at his side, clutching his arm, with her eyes riveted on the leopard, stood Marie.
Values flashed through Finnerty's mind with lightning speed. He had expected the jungle dweller to flee when the electric glare lit up the scene, but the leopard was unafraid; he even crept a pace closer to those below. His forepaws gripped nervously at the ground in a churning movement; his tail stiffened; but before he could rise in a flying tackle a stream of red light belched from Swinton's gun; there was a coughing roar telling of a hit, and the leopard, turned by the shot, bounded into the jungle, his crashing progress growing fainter as he fled. Then darkness closed out the scene of almost tragedy, for Finnerty had turned the switch.
On the point of calling in assurance, Swinton was checked by the sudden death of the light; he understood the major's motive.
The two sat still, while Finnerty, his grasp on Swinton's shoulder, whispered into his ear: "The leopard is wounded; he won't turn now that he has started to run; let them get away without knowing who saw them, for they're in no danger."
There came the sound of feet going with stumbling speed up the path as Marie, dreading discovery more than the terrors of the jungle path, clutching Gilfain's hand, fled.
After a little, Finnerty said: "Fancy we may go back now. I wonder how much of this business the Banjara knew; how much of it is a twist of fate upsetting somebody's plans." And as they climbed the hill path from Jadoo Nala he continued: "Tomorrow morning we'll follow the pugs of that black devil; there'll be blood enough for the shikari to track him down, I think; he'll have stiffened up from his wound by then and we'll get him."
With irrelevance the captain blurted, in a voice filled with disgust: "That young ass!"
Finnerty laughed softly. "The dear old earl sent him to India to be out of the way of skirts. It can't be done!"
"But how did he get a meeting with that foolish virgin; he's only been here three days! And how did the Banjara know, and how did—oh, one's life here is a damn big query mark!"
"I should say that there's been a note written, either by the girl to his giddy lordship or vice versa; Darna Singh has made the mistake of supposing Prince Ananda was the man she was to meet; that's why the black leopard was turned loose."
"Do you think it really was the prince's beast?"
"Yes; that's why he didn't run when the light flashed. He's accustomed to it in the zoo grounds. But it was a fiendish caper, and Gilfain is fortunate."
"I think it proves the girl is a spy; she probably, at the prince's suggestion, led the young fool on. I'm glad he doesn't know anything about——" Swinton broke off suddenly, as the heavy gloom of the forest interior was brushed aside like a curtain, disclosing to their eyes a fairy scene—the prince's palace.
The moon, which had leaped high above the barrier of the forest, poured a flood of yellow light across the open plateau, gilding with gold leaf the mosquelike dome roof of a turret and shimmering a white marble minaret till it sparkled like a fretwork thing of silver. The Lake of the Golden Coin was a maze of ribboned colours where the mahseer rose to its surface in play or in pursuit of night flies. A dreamy quiet lay over all the mass of gleaming white and purple shadow as they swung to the road that circled the gardens. Coming to the big teakwood gate, Finnerty clutched the captain's arm, bringing him to a halt as a sigh from its rusty hinges told it had just been closed by some one.
"I saw him," Finnerty whispered as they passed on. "It was Ananda, I swear."
Over the walls floated the perfume of rose and jasmine and tuberose; so sensuous, so drugged the heavy night air that it suggested unreality, mysticism, dreams, and beyond, rounding a curve, to their nostrils came the pungent, acrid smell of a hookah from the servants' quarters. Even deeper of the Orient, of the subtle duplicity of things, was this.
Swinton spat on the roadway, and Finnerty, knowing it as a token of disgust, muttered: "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves."
As they dipped down a hill toward the path that led to Finnerty's bungalow they came upon Lord Victor's horse leisurely dawdling along, stopping at times for a juicy snack from some succulent bush, and altogether loafing, a broken rein dangling from the bit to occasionally bring him up with a jerk as he stepped on it. At their approach he scuttled off into the jungle.
"Gilfain's nag!" Finnerty commented. "Wishing to keep this meeting secret, he's left the syce at home and tied the pony to a tree up there somewhere; the shot probably frightened it."
"What's the horse doing on this road?" Swinton asked.
"It's a shorter cut down to the maharajah's stables in Darpore town than by the tonga road. Lord Victor will have to walk; we couldn't catch that harebrained weed even if we wanted to."
"Come on, major," Swinton cried, pushing forward; "I've got an idea. You give me a horse and I'll gallop back to my bungalow, getting there ahead of the young ass."
"I see," Finnerty grunted as they strode swiftly along. "You'll tell his lordship that you've been in bed for hours, and let him guess who was his audience at Jadoo Pool. The Banjara didn't deliver that note or his lordship wouldn't have been there."
As they hurried along, Swinton panted: "Devil of a hole for a flirtation; he must be an enthusiast!"
They swung into the bungalow, and Finnerty sent the watchman to have a syce bring "Phyu," adding that if there was delay a most proper beating would eventuate. As the watchman hurried away on his mission the major said: "Phyu is a Shan pony; he's only thirteen hands, but you can gallop him down that hill without fear of bucking his shins, and you couldn't do that with an Arab."
While they waited, Finnerty explained: "The girl made that appointment for some reason. She would know that nobody would see them together there, as natives don't travel that path at night, and she would know that tiger and leopard do not ordinarily come to the pool."
"How did the Banjara know?"
"India, my dear boy—and servants; but he only half knew at that; he thought it would be the prince. I think even if Lord Victor did kill his dog, having been paid for it, had he known a sahib was the proposed victim he would have told us."
A grey, sturdy Shan pony, led by a running syce, dashed around the bungalow, and as Swinton mounted, Finnerty said: "I'll send for Mahadua right away and make ready for a peep-o'-day follow-up of that wounded leopard; we can't let him roam to kill natives. Meet me at the top of the tonga road at daybreak. In the meantime—well, you know how to handle his lordship."
Then the captain pounded down the mountain road at an unreasonable rate, though his speed was really unnecessary, for, clad in pajamas, he had half finished a long cheroot in an armchair on the verandah when he saw the form of Gilfain coming wearily up the gravelled road.
When Swinton knocked the ash from his cheroot, disclosing the lighted end, the pedestrian acquired an instantaneous limp; his rather lethargic mentality was quickened by an inspiration, and he hobbled up the steps and along the verandah at a pathetic pace.
"Been long home, anxious guardian?" he gasped, sinking into a chair.
"About an hour," Swinton answered blithely.
"I got moony lonesome," Lord Victor explained as the smoker evinced no curiosity.
"And went for a walk, eh? Where did you go—down to the bazaar?"
Even to Gilfain's unperceptive mind the opening for a sweeping lie seemed a trifle too wide. Indeed, the fact that he had on riding boots was rather against this proposition. He didn't answer at once, a twinge in his newly injured ankle giving him an opportunity for a pause.
"You didn't see my syce about, did you?" he asked as a feeler.
"No; why—weren't you walking?"
"No; I went for a bit of a ride—down by the river—and just where the road forks over by that nala where we took the elephant after the tiger something sprang out of the jungle, let an awful roar out of him, and that fool country bred of mine bolted—he's a superb ass of a horse—jinked at a shadow, and went over a cut bank into a little stream kind of a place; I came a cropper, with my foot caught in a stirrup, and was dragged a bit. In fact, I went by-by for a few minutes. How the devil my foot came out of the stirrup I don't know. When I came to that three-toed creature they call a horse had vanished, and it's taken me rather well over an hour to limp back."
Then the cripple, holding his ankle in both hands across his knee, leaned back in his chair with eyes closed as if in agony, inwardly muttering: "Gad! I wonder if that bally romance hangs together."
"Was it a tiger or a leopard?" Swinton asked in an even voice.
"I—I rather fancy it was a leopard. I didn't see overmuch of the silly brute, my mount being in such an ecstasy of fright."
"What about the syce; perhaps the leopard nailed him?" the captain asked solicitously.
"Hardly think it; I didn't see the bloomer after I left the bungalow. Oh!" It was the ankle.
This cry of pain galvanised Swinton into compassion; it also gave him an idea of how to mete out retribution to the awful liar beside him.
"We've got to fix up that ankle right away," he declared, rising.
"Oh, don't bother, old chap; I'll just bathe it."
"Worst thing you could do," Swinton declared professionally. "I've got a powerful white liniment; it stings like the juice of Hades. Probably peel the bark off, but it will prevent swelling."
With a sigh Lord Victor surrendered, and Swinton, bringing out his bottle, rubbed the romancer's ankle until he groaned—not from an imaginative pain. Then the limb was bound up in a bandage that all but checked the circulation.
"Feel better now; that give you relief?" And Swinton's voice was as solicitously tender as a mother's.
"Oh, yes—thanks!" And inwardly the exasperated patient swore.
Of course a whiskey and soda was part of the treatment, doctor and patient both taking the medicine. As they sipped, the patient asked cautiously: "What did you and the major do in the evening?"
"Oh, we took a stroll up on the hill."
"Eh, what! Oh, heavens—my ankle!" The guilty conscience had all but betrayed its possessor. "Go up to see the prince?" he asked, his voice holding an assumed casualness.
"We didn't go quite that far." Gilfain breathed easier. "Finnerty is a great chap on birds' nests, and we saw some rather curious ones."
Lord Victor, in sudden inspiration, put his hand on Swinton's arm and gave it a knowing pinch. "You didn't happen to meet fräulein, old boy, did you?" And he laughed.
"Not bad, by Jove!" Swinton confided to himself; then aloud: "I'm not interested; also I'm going to bed. I believe I'll take a gun early in the morning and see if I can pick up the tracks of that leopard."
"What leopard?"
"The one that—that—charged your pony."
"Oh, yes, of course. But Lord bless me, man, he may be miles away by the morning."
"Come on, Gilfain; I'll give you an arm in to bed. You hadn't better get up in the morning. In fact, you'd better lie up all day to-morrow; in this hot climate a wrench like that may produce black inflammation."
"Black inflammation sounds good, anyway," Swinton thought as the young man, leaning heavily on his arm, hobbled to his bedroom.
Swinton fell asleep pondering over the proverbial thought that no man can serve two masters, he being that no man in his now divided duty. In the earl's interests he should remove that nobleman's son from the vicinity of Fräulein Marie at once. A most dangerous woman she was, no doubt. In the interest of his real master, the government, he should stay on the spot and nip Ananda's intrigue.
Chapter XV
Swinton had left instructions to be wakened before the first raucous-voiced crow had opened his piratical beak, so, in the chill dawn half light, a grey mist from the river bed still hovering like a shroud over the plain, the voice of his bearer calling softly: "Sahe-e-b! Sahe-e-b!" brought him out of a deep slumber. Dressing, he chuckled over the apocryphal sprained ankle that had relieved him of Lord Victor's company or offer of it. Passing that young nobleman's room, lamp in hand, he saw, through the open door, a very red ankle, devoid of its bandage, hanging over the bed. Swinton chuckled, muttering: "Bad patient!"
His horse was waiting, and with a rifle across the saddle he went up the hill, meeting Finnerty, with whom was Mahadua, at the appointed place.
"We'll leave our gee-gees here with the syces," Finnerty said, "and Mahadua will take us by a shortcut path along the edge of the hill to Jadoo Pool."
At Jadoo Pool, they rested while Mahadua, as keen as a "black tracker," searched the ground for the leopard's trail.
Finnerty had imparted to the shikari nothing beyond the fact that a leopard had been seen in that immediate vicinity, and it was supposed he was wounded. The shikari had declared emphatically that it would prove to be the leopard with the man-eater's rosettes, and, no doubt, was the animal that came out of the cave, giving rise to the belief that a ghost homed there.
First, Mahadua passed to the plastic clay banks of the little stream that trickled into the pool; there he picked up the pugs of a leopard, following them unerringly to where the cunning brute had backed away and circled when he saw Finnerty in the machan. On this circling trail a stick freshly turned, a nestlike hollow in the loose leaves where a soft paw had pushed, guided the tracker, so close to instinct in his faculties, till he came upon blood spots and torn-up earth where the leopard had been shot.
For twenty minutes Finnerty and Swinton waited, and then Mahadua came back, saying: "Chita has been shot in a hind leg, for his jumps in running are not big, and though he went to the deep jungle at first he is now back at the cave."
As they went up Jadoo Nala there were no blood spots on its stony bed, but Mahadua explained: "Chita remained hid in the jungle for a time, and the bleeding stopped."
Coming to the doorlike entrance of the cave, Finnerty peered cautiously in, and, seeing nothing, passed beyond, his eyes searching for tracks. A dozen paces and a sibilant whistle from behind whirled him about to see Mahadua facing the opening, his little axe poised for a blow of defence.
When Finnerty, cocking both barrels of his Paradox, raced back, the shikari said: "Chita stuck his head out to look at the sahib's back, but when I whistled he disappeared."
"Was it 'Spots' or a black leopard, Mahadua?"
"Black, sahib," he answered.
"A black leopard is the most vicious thing on earth," Finnerty said in English, his gun holding guard, "and one wounded and in a cave is a matter for consideration."
"He won't come out; that's sure," Swinton commented.
"Not before night—if we're here—and we can't afford the time to wait that long."
"Smoke him out," Swinton suggested.
"Difficult; smoke won't go where you want it to, but I'll ask Mahadua if it's possible."
"The cave is too big," the shikari replied to the query.
"How big?" Swinton asked with sudden interest.
"I don't know," and the native's eyes were evasive. "I have heard it said that the cave went far in, but I have no desire to go into the home of the spirits."
"My Rampore hounds would draw him," Finnerty said thoughtfully; "but I don't want to get them mauled—perhaps killed."
The name Rampore conveyed to Mahadua the sahib's meaning, though the English words were unintelligible. "The Banjara would send in dogs if the sahib would pay him well," he suggested.
"He would not risk his Banjara hounds," the major objected.
"True, huzoor, but he also has 'bobbery' dogs—half Banjara breed—and they being trained to the hunt will go in after the wounded chita."
"It's a good idea, Swinton," Finnerty declared. "We've done the very thing I was bucking about last night; we've set adrift a wounded leopard who'll likely turn man-eater if he doesn't die and we'll be responsible for every native he kills."
"We've simply got to finish him off," Swinton concurred.
"We must. If you'll wait here with the shikari, keeping your eye on that hole so he doesn't sneak away, I'll pick up my horse and gallop down to get the Banjara and his 'bobbery pack.'"
Perhaps the going of Finnerty, with his large virility, had taken something of mental sustenance from the shikari, for he now lost somewhat his buoyant nonchalance.
"Sit you here, sahib, on this flat rock," he advised, "for here you face well the cave door, and if the evil brute makes a sudden rush you will have an advantage. As to the dogs, if it is a bhut they will not enter the cave, and if they do enter it will be because the spirit has gone."
"But, Mahadua, we saw him. How will he disappear through the rock walls of a cave?"
"As to the ways of a bhut not even the priest at my village of Gaum could say aught."
"Did you ever see a spirit, Mahadua?" Swinton queried, with the double purpose of whiling away the time as they waited and drawing from the man one of those eerie tales that originate with the half-wild forest dwellers.
"Sahib, I never saw my father, but there is no doubt that I had one; it was said that he died before I was born, and I believe it."
"Well, did you then know of one from people you believed in?"
"Yes, sahib. The priest of Gaum, which is my village, knew well the tiger that was named the 'One Who Looks Up.' You know, sahib, a tiger when he walks through the jungle never looks up at the trees, there being nothing there in the way of his food nor that he fears; though if he be shot at from a machan, after that, if he catches in his nostrils the taint of a sahib, he will remember, and will see such a trap."
"Tell me of the One Who Looks Up," Swinton begged.
"He was a man-killer, Sahib, and one day he killed a woodsman, but was disturbed before he had eaten the poor fellow, and went away, the man's bhut going with him. A Dep'ty Sahib had a machan put in a tree above the body, and sitting there in the moonlight he saw bagh creeping toward his victim; but before the Dep'ty Sahib could shoot the dead man's arm lifted up, and a finger pointed at the machan. Bagh looked up, and seeing the Dep'ty Sahib fled."
The shikari's voice suddenly dropped to a whisper, and without the move of a muscle he said: "Look at the cave mouth and you will see chita watching you. Move very slow and you may get a shot."
Swinton's gun was lying across his knee, and gently pulling back the hammers he slowly carried the stock toward his shoulder. As their eyes met, the leopard's lip curled in a snarl that bared his hooked fangs, and his ears flattened back, giving the head a cobra-like look. Inch by inch the gun crept upward, the unblinking eyes viewing this move with malevolent interest.
As the stock touched Swinton's shoulder he drooped his head to train his eye along the sights, for the shot must go true to the small brain beneath that sloping skull, or, stung by the wound, the leopard would charge and there would be no escape from a mauling; but his eye, travelling along the barrels, looked into the dark void of the cave. In a brief second the cunning beast had vanished.
"He will not return for some time, sahib; he knows what a gun is. Perhaps even it is a spirit," the shikari said.
Dropping the gun to his knee Swinton asked: "What was the end of the One Who Looks Up?"
"The Dep'ty Sahib was a man of resource, and coming down he pegged to the ground both arms of the one whose bhut had gone with the tiger; then, as he waited in the machan, the tiger came back, thinking the sahib would have gone, and, as the dead man gave him no sign, crept close up, when the Dep'ty Sahib killed him."
"And you believe that story is true, Mahadua?"
"The guru says it is; but whether it is true or not matters only to the one who is devoured."
For some time Mahadua sat facing the cave, turning over in his mind a little business venture; then raising his head, he looked into Swinton's dead-blue eyes, only to turn away in blinking haste before their disconcerting inertia. He coughed, adjusted his little brown cap, and said: "Sahib, as to this one in the cave we shall know when the dogs come if it is a spirit; but if we had made an offering to the shrine, or even promised Safed Jan, who guards the mountain pass, a goat in sacrifice, all might have been well."
"It is too late now," Swinton suggested.
"If the sahib will bestow a silver rupee for the sacrifice of a goat to Safed Jan, Mahadua will make a ceremony over the gun and the bullet will not be turned by the spirit."
Swinton smiled at this wily touch while the man's master was away, but drawing forth a rupee he bestowed it upon the man who had capitalised a spirit. Very gravely Mahadua plucked a handful of grass, and, wrapping the coin in this, rubbed it along the barrels of Swinton's gun, tapped the locks with it, and then slipped the rupee into his jacket pocket, saying in a voice blithesome with relief—or cupidity: "If Safad Jan has observed, luck will follow."
Pariah-like yowls came up the pass, and Finnerty, with the herdsman and his brother holding in leash six dogs, appeared. The pack was a motley one, a canine kaleidoscope that, as it tumbled in the sunshine, showed all the various hues of ancestry from red Irish terrier to mizzled collie. One had a bulldog head and the lank, scraggy body of a village pariah; two had the powerfully boned frame of the Banjara hound; but all showed the uncertain, treacherous temper of their pariah cross.
Each dog was held by a rawhide leash fastened to a wide leather collar studded with iron spikes to prevent a leopard from taking his favourite jugular-severing jaw grip of the neck.
As he sat down for a minute's rest, the major said: "I fancy this may cost me a pretty penny for my friend, the herdsman, has made me agree to pay ten rupees for each dog killed, and five apiece for the mauled ones. He was deuced curious over the night's work, but I told him we saw no one. He admitted that he didn't deliver the note to Lord Victor, saying he had lost it."
"Do you think by any chance he had an inkling Lord Victor was going there, and didn't want him to know we'd be there?"
"No. He says we saw no one because we spoiled the hunt by going like a marriage procession; that we went by the road, and that his brother, the watchman, saw Prince Ananda watching us, both going and coming."
"The sahib will have rested now, and the sun is hot," the Banjara interposed.
Finnerty, rising, placed the men; Swinton behind the flat boulder he had sat on, and from the top of which his gun would range the cave mouth; two convenient trees were allotted to Mahadua, the herdsman, and his brother when the dogs had been slipped. Finnerty would stand on some ground a little higher where he could rake the nala, both up and down, should the leopard bolt.
The dogs had been given a noseful of the leopard's trail, and, when they were slipped, with a chorus of yelps they made for the cave, while their owner slipped nimbly to his allotted tree. It was a tense moment; the Banjara, perched on the lower limb of a mhowa, was avariciously hoping the leopard would kill the whole pack, for at ten rupees a head they were better dead.
Mahadua's face grew grave as, instead of the tumult of a fierce battle, stillness held within the cavern; the eager yelps of the dogs as they had scrambled over lose stones to enter the cave had ceased. The leopard was, no doubt, a spirit, and had perhaps hushed the dogs. At any rate, a flesh-and-blood leopard would now be giving battle and voices of pain and passion would be filling the cavern with cries.
Finnerty was muttering: "Damn if I can make it out; it's a rummy go!"
At that instant the pack came stringing out, and the leader stood looking wonderingly at the sahibs.
"They are afraid," Mahadua jeered; "they went in thinking it was a hare. Oh, they are a true Banjara pack!"
The herdsman put a hand on a long knife in his belt, and with fury in his eyes said: "Will the Presence take a slipper to this monkey's mouth or shall I open its windpipe? The leopard is not within, for my dogs do not lie."
The pack was now running about in the silly, aimless manner of "gaze" dogs where there is no quarry to see, and only a scent that is cold to their very dull nose-sense.
The shikari pointed this out, saying: "Keeper of mud cows, if the leopard had but just passed out in the fear of your coming he would have left a fresh scent trail that even your dogs, who hunt but by the eye, would have found, and if the chita is not a spirit he is still within."
The Banjara drew his long, vicious knife, but as Finnerty grasped his arm he said, pointing in disdain at Mahadua: "This is a knife for game, not for cutting the throat of a chicken; I go into the cave to prove that of dog or shikari the shikari is the liar."
At this his brother also drew a knife, and, calling to the dogs, who sprang at his bidding to the cave, the two Banjaras followed at their heels.
"We might have a look; it's altogether mysterious," Finnerty said, turning to the captain.
The latter nodded. "I've got an idea; we'd better go in!"
They passed into a long, narrow chamber—so long that it reached into deep gloom, with no end wall showing. They could see the dogs pass into the mysterious black shadow beyond and again reappear; always, going and coming, they sniffed at one spot. Here Finnerty struck a match, and Mahadua, dropping to his knees, examined the rock, saying: "The leopard rested here—there is blood."
Led by Finnerty, they followed the dogs along the corridor, coming upon a blank wall. There was no leopard; he had vanished as mystically as a spirit might have done. Finnerty lighted matches, but there were only the sullen walls on three sides.
"It is as I have said," the Banjara growled; "Mahadua, who has grown too old for the hunt, gave forth so much monkey chatter that the sahib saw not the leopard pass."
Mahadua lifted his cap. "See, hunter of cow tics, I take off my head-cover to thee as a great shikari. Sahib," he pleaded, "turn back this owner of mongrels, for I know where the chita will be found."
"Where?" Finnerty questioned.
"He will go up in the hills to the village of Kohima, where he was caught in a trap. It is said he killed many people near that village, for he was a man-eater."
"How far is Kohima?"
"It is six kos, or perhaps eight, and again it might be that it is ten by the road, but the chita will go through the jungle in a matter of half that distance."
The Banjara laughed, clapping a cupped palm over his mouth, giving vent to a note of derision. "The little monkey has a desire in his belly, sahib," he said, ceasing his popping mirth. "The women of Kohima are famed for the arak they distill, so Mahadua, with the sahib to pay for it, would get in a state to see leopards even in the village."
"I think we'd better get rid of this argument," Finnerty remarked, adding: "Come to the bungalow for your pay, Lumbani."
Calling their dogs, the Banjara and his brother departed.
"Now we're up against a mental dead wall, captain. What shall we do?" Finnerty asked.
"You'd like to go after Burra Moti, of course—"
"Yes; but I'd rather pot this black devil. I don't want any natives' blood on my head."
"But we haven't a trail to follow; I believe we'll find that leopard back in his cage."
"Good heavens, man, he couldn't get through the solid wall!"
"But he did."
Finnerty blinked his eyes in unison with his rapid thoughts. A suspicion lingered in his mind that the animal had really slipped from the cave without Swinton seeing him—perhaps through his attention having been taken up by Mahadua. Indeed it was the only reasonable explanation of his astounding disappearance. With boyish diffidence he asked: "Did you and Mahadua do anything; that is, did he take up your attention with—well, he's a garrulous old cuss, especially on spirits."
Swinton in candour related what had occurred, and when he told of the rupee-gun ceremony the major, with a start, exclaimed: "Ah!"
"I know what you mean by that, major," Swinton said, with a little laugh, "but I never took my eyes off that hole in the wall."
But Finnerty shook his head. "Do you know what they call the leopard in every mess in India?—'The Artful Dodger.'" Then he added hastily: "We'll settle your theory first, captain. On our way back to have some breakfast we'll look in at the zoo, and if there's a black leopard there with a wound it will be the one we're after; if there is one without a wound it will mean that we shot a jungle beast last night; if the cage is empty the brute either slipped your vigilance or is, as Mahadua says, a spirit."
The word leopard being familiar to the servant, he knew what the sahibs were discussing, and contributed: "Our eyes were always on the door, sahib, and if a spirit took the leopard through the walls he would lead him to Kohima, for it is said that all his kills were made through the aid of one he acquired there."
"Come on!" Finnerty said. "We're in a fit condition of mystification to almost accept the little man's thesis."
A strange attendant was at the teakwood gate, but when the major explained that they simply wanted a look at the animals, being sahibs, he swung the gate for their entrance, closing it from the inside to stand near them. The heavily barred cage was empty, and there was no movement in the den behind to which a small door gave entrance.
"Where is the black leopard?" Finnerty asked quite casually.
A frown of reticence clouded the native's face as he answered: "I don't know, sahib."
With a covert movement, the major slipped into the man's fingers a rupee. The gateman coughed, adjusted his belt, and said: "The Burra Sahib, Nawab Darna Singh, sent away the man who was on the gate; that is why I am now here."
"Did the man sleep at his post?"
"It may be that he did, sahib, and that way the black leopard escaped; but he was beaten by the rajah—no doubt he deserved it—and Nawab Darna Singh thinks that in anger he may have freed the dangerous one, for a small door was left open."
"And the leopard has not been seen to-day?"
"No, sahib; but it is said he was shot, by whom or where I have not heard."
Then the two passed through the gate as mystified as when they entered.
"That destroys my solution of the mystery," Swinton declared.
With a laugh, Finnerty said: "Mahadua has the only unassailable belief—that it is a spirit. But now for some breakfast. Our horses are just around the turn. We'll slip over to my bungalow, and while we're eating send down for Lord Victor."
Chapter XVI
When Captain Swinton and Major Finnerty arrived at the bungalow a note was sent to Lord Victor asking him to come up on horseback, as they were going off into the jungle.
Knowing that servants' ears were animate dictaphones, the two sahibs ate breakfast in comparative silence, the strenuous morning after the black leopard having braced their appetites.
Later, at restful ease in big chairs, the major said: "In this accursed land of spies one must find a place where his eyes reach farther than his voice. That, by the way, was a trick of a clever tiger I killed, the Gharwalla man-eater, through discovering that when he had made a kill he would drag the body to a certain bare hilltop from which he could watch for danger. He'd been driven up to a gun so often that he was shy of secret places. There was something grewsome about that tiger's fiendish cunning. His favourite trick was to crouch in cover that overhung a roadway, and as a bullock cart came along pick off the driver with a flying leap and carry him to this hilltop for a leisurely meal. There was a pool close by, and, after eating, he would take a drink, roll in the sand, and then go quite a mile to thick cover for a sleep. I potted him when he was having one of his sand baths. You've seen a dog roll on a rug in the ecstasy of a full stomach, but with this chap there was something wondrously beautiful—if one could forget the horribleness of it—in the play of those terrible muscles and the undulating curves of the striped body as he rolled in luxurious ease, paws fanning the air and his ivory-studded jaws showing in an after dinner yawn. I watched him for ten minutes, fascinated by the charm of subtle movement combined with strength, for I was well hidden in a thick growth of rose bramble, its mottled colouring of pink and grey and green deceiving his quick eye. I was lying flat, my 10-bore covering him. When I gave a low whistle the big head faced me, and the eyes, hardened to a yellow-green murder look, were straight on. But just below the jaw was a spot with no hard skull to deflect the heavy, soft-lead ball, and behind that feathered curl of white hair was the motor of that powerful machine—the heart. He never knew what struck him. The whole cavity was just pulp—heart and lungs—when we skinned him."
A native who had come in from the jungle now came to the verandah. "Huzoor," he began, "we knew that Burra Moti was near in the night, for Raj Bahadar was restless, cocking his ears and making soft speech through his trunk to the cunning old lady; but maybe on account of the camp fire, which we had lighted to show her that it was but a party of men who would eat and had sweet cakes for elephants who approached in a friendly spirit, she came not in. We could hear the bell tinkle, tinkle, tinkle——"
"You fool! Why do you mix lies in your report; the elephant had no bell."
Undismayed, the man answered: "The mahout maintained as much, sahib, but we all heard the bell, and Moti was in a sweet temper, for she laughed, as elephants do when they are pleased."
"It was a bird you heard—the sweet-singing shama, or a chakwa calling to his mate across a stream. Did you see her?"
"It was still dark, but we could hear Moti sigh as though her heart was troubled because she could not come to partake of the cakes we burned so that they would be known in her nostrils."
"Couldn't come! She was free."
"As to a chain, it is true; but the sahib knows that evil attaches to things that are sacred of a temple when they have fallen into the hands of others."
"Speak!" Finnerty commanded, as the native hesitated.
"It is said—perhaps it is but a rumour of the bazaar—that Moti was of a temple up in the hills, and that in the bell was a sacred sapphire."
"But how came Moti to my place? Know you that, sage one?"
The native dismissed the sarcasm with a salaam, answering: "It is said that the temple was looted of jewels that were buried beneath a pillar."
With a start, Finnerty asked: "And the stone pillar—was it taken?" And he laughed as if in derision.
"I have heard that the pillar is in a new place, sahib."
"Is it in the prince's grounds?" And Finnerty swept an arm toward the palace hill.
"There is a stone standing there that did not grow with the roses," the native answered enigmatically.
"Just another move in our deranged friend's plot," Finnerty commented. He turned to the native: "Was the lama of the temple killed?"
"Men who are dead do not come to the market place to complain, and as the priest has not spoken it may be that he is dead."
"Here comes our friend in perpetuity, the Banjara!" Finnerty exclaimed. He rose, and, going into the bungalow, returned to drop a rupee in the native's hand, saying: "Go back to Raj Bahadar and tell the mahout I will be along shortly." He turned to the captain.
"Swinton, all one's servants may know the thing a man is risking his life to discover and he be none the wiser till some one babbles it like a child."
"As in the mutiny," Swinton suggested. "Our officials saw cow dung plastered on the trees—some few heard what they called 'silly whispers,' but all native India knew, and all India remained hushed till the dead silence was shattered by the tornado."
"Exactly. And while we say Ananda is insane, and all these things are child's play, think of the trifling things that were used as factors to breed that holocaust of hate. The Mussulmans told that the British Raj had greased the cartridges they had to bite with pig's fat to defile their religion; that suttee had been abolished to break the Hindu faith by filling the land with widow prostitutes; that water the Hindu sepoys drank had come in contact with leather valves made from the skin of a cow. There were other trivial things lied into mountains of sins. Ananda knows all that; he has the cunning of a serpent and the viciousness of a black leopard."
The Banjara had arrived, and Finnerty counted out five rupees; then, with a touch of Irish humour, he added another, saying, with a smile: "This for your disappointment in not having a dog killed."
"If the monkey man, Mahadua, had been true to his caste, which is to watch and not talk, there would have been profit for both sides—the sahib would have obtained a kill."
When he had tucked away his money, the Banjara said: "My brother is not now keeper at the tiger garden."
"Why? For whose sin does he suffer?"
"Darna Singh let the black leopard out to meet Rajah Ananda at Jadoo Pool."
"The rajah wasn't there," Finnerty declared in a drawling way.
"No; there was some talk that was either a lie or a mistake; it was another at the pool."
"Who?"
"The horse of the young sahib was found on the hill, and the mem-sahib was seen between the pool and her bungalow."
"A ghost story, Banjara, and it's all finished."
"A bullock that is dead is dead, but a herdsman watches that the other bullocks do not also die from the same thing."
"I trust you, Banjara," Finnerty said, seemingly at an irrelevant angle.
"The mem-sahib rides every day up into the hills, and the roads are not good for pleasure. Packets of cotton that have stomachs come down over the road; cotton grows here."
"What has cotton to do with the one who rides?"
"Perhaps the mem-sahib rides to meet the one who comes behind the packets. My brother, who was the son of a Banjara priest, one who had visions that all the tribe believed, has also had a vision. Perhaps the beating caused a fever, for visions come thus."
"What saw he?" Finnerty asked, knowing that the herdsman had something of moment to tell in this way.
"There was a full moon in the sky, and by its light he saw a rajah, and the rajah had many guns and soldiers—even sahibs as soldiers—and he was driving out the English. And the guns were hidden behind bales of cotton."
"Is that all?" Finnerty asked, for the herdsman had stopped.
"My brother woke at that point, huzoor, and his eyes fell upon a mhowa tree in full bloom."
"Which means that the mhowa is in bloom now?"
"Of the interpreting of visions I know nothing, but it might be that way."
The Banjara now departed, and Swinton said: "Do you remember Prince Ananda saying that if a holy man stood by the Lake of the Golden Coin in the full of the moon, when the mhowa was in bloom, having the three sacred sapphires, he would see the dead king rise in his golden boat?"
"Yes, and this cowherd's chatter means an uprising soon. I hear hoofs; that will be Lord Victor. Are we going to accuse him of being at the pool?"
"I think not. We know as much now as we shall if we question him. But we'll keep him with us; a young ass like that isn't safe without a keeper—he's no match for as clever a traitor as this girl."
Finnerty's chair groaned as though it had received a twist from his big frame, but his voice was devoid of protest: "I can't make the girl out. My mind is in a psychological state, and I suppose I'm influenced by the apparent candour in her eyes. They seem to express trouble, too, as if she were searching for a moral finger post, for a way out of darkness." Then the major expressed an apologetic phrase: "I'm afraid I'm a bit awkward at psychology; jungle dwellers are more in my line."
Swinton put his hand on the big man's shoulder. "My dear major, I wish I'd had a brother like you. My family was baked in the crucible of government service for generations; we're executive automatons."
"I understand; you're an Englishman—Damn it! I mean, in youth you never roamed the hills like shaggy-haired colts as we do in Ireland."
"If I had I wouldn't have made a good Raj policeman. But to hark back. The German machine, more soulless than our own, knows the value of Mona Lisa eyes, and Marie was probably picked for this delicate mission for the very quality that has won your sympathy—her appealing womanhood."
"And yet my perhaps sympathy for the girl was birthed by accident, not design on her part."
"What is an attractive girl doing here so close to Prince Ananda? Why is she here with a Prussian who is an enemy of the British Raj? Why is she averse to being approached? What is she searching for in the hills? It's the road to China, and guns have already arrived, according to our Banjara."
"I haven't an answer for any one of your queries, captain, but we must investigate those packets."
Lord Victor arrived now, and as he had not yet seen the skin of Pundit Bagh he was taken to where it was pegged out on the ground and being rubbed with ashes and alum. This kill of a tiger was probably the first incident in his life calculated to raise elation in the hearts of his friends.
"Something to tack to, eh?" he cried joyfully. "Fancy I hear the chaps in fluffy old London saying as I pass, 'That's the man that shot a big man-eater on foot.' No swank to that, major, for I did. You know that dicky little chapel dedicated to the tiger god?"
"Yes; the one down in the plain."
"It's simply buried under devotee bric-a-brac this morning. They should have a sign up 'Wet Paint,' for it's gory blood red. When I came along a fat black man, rolled in white muslin, cursed me—absolutely bowled at my wicket with a ball of brimstone. Now what do you make of that, major? It wasn't about the cow dog, for the bounder had one English word, 'tiger,' which he simply sprayed his lingo with."
Mahadua had come to accompany the party, and, somewhat perplexed, Finnerty turned to the shikari for an explanation.
"Yes, sahib," Mahadua said, "Pundit Bagh was a jungle god, and they are making prayer to the shrine so that the spirit may return again as a tiger to protect them from such as the black leopard."
Finnerty interpreted: "They feel that you have slain one who defended them against leopards and pig and deer that ate their crops."
"Oh, I say! Sort of a gentleman burglar who did not murder his victims."
The shikari explained that the man who had visited verbal wrath upon Lord Victor was a money lender who lent money at a high rate to the farmers to buy bullocks when the tiger had killed their plough beasts, so he was angry at this loss of revenue. He also said that some one was telling the natives that the sahibs were trying to destroy their religion by killing their jungle gods.
"Who tells them this?" Finnerty asked.
The shikari answered evasively: "This is not my country, so they do not tell me what is in the hidden room."
Chapter XVII
Major Finnerty had made arrangements for a full day after Burra Moti. Coolies had been sent on with provisions in round wicker baskets slung from a bamboo yoke, and soon the three sahibs started.
Perhaps it was the absence of immediate haste, a lack of pressing action, that allowed their minds to rest on their surroundings. Really, though, it was Lord Victor who drew them to a recognition of their arboreal surroundings with: "I say! Look at that bonfire—but it's glorious!" his riding whip indicating a gold mohur tree that, clothed in its gorgeous spring mantle of vivid red bloom, suggested its native name of "Forest on Fire."
"Yes," Finnerty said, "it seems to add to the heat of the sun, and, as if that weren't enough, listen to that damn cuckoo, the 'brain-fever bird,' vocal in his knowledge that we'll soon be frying in Hades."
The bird of fiendish iteration squeaked: "Fee-e-e-ver, fee-e-e-ver, fee-e-e-ver!" till he came to a startled hush, as, with noisy cackle, a woodpecker, all golden beak and red crest atop his black-and-white waistcoat, shot from the delicate green foliage.
"It's a land of gorgeous colouring," Finnerty commented; "trees and birds alike."
"Minus the scent and song," Swinton added as a hornbill opened his yellow coffin beak to screech in jarring discord.
But just when they had passed the sweet-scented neem, and then a kautchnor standing like some giant artificial wooden thing decorated with creamy white-and pink-petaled lilies, Finnerty drew rein, holding up his hand, and to their ears floated from a tangle of babool the sweet song of a shama. It was like the limpid carolling of a nightingale in a hedge at home; it bred a hunger of England in Lord Victor's boy heart. When the song hushed, as they passed the babool Finnerty pointed to a little long-tailed bird with dull red stomach, and the youth, lifting his helmet, exclaimed, "You topping old bird! I'd back you against a lark."
Perhaps India, populous with bird and animal life as well as human, was always as much on parade as it seemed this morning, and that they now but observed closer. At any rate, as they left the richer-garbed foothills for the heavier sombreness of the forest, their eyes were caught by the antics of a black-plumaged bird who had seized the rudder of a magpie and was being towed along by that squawking, frightened mischief-maker.
With a chuckle, Finnerty explained: "He's a king crow, known to all as the 'police wallah,' for he's eternally putting others to rights. That 'pie' has been looting some nest, and the king crow is driving him over into the next county."
Like a gateway between the land of the living and the land of beyond, its giant white limbs weird as the arms of a devil-fish, reaching through glossy leaves to almost touch a wall of sal, stood a pipal, its wide-spreading roots, daubed with red paint, nursing a clay idol that sat amid pots of honey, and sweet cakes, and gaudy tinsel, and little streamers of coloured cloth—all tribute to the god of the sacred wild fig. Beyond this they were in a cool forest; above, high against a blue sky, the purple haze of the sal bloom, their advent sending a grey-backed fat little dweller scuttling away on his short legs.
"A badger!" Lord Victor cried eagerly.
"Kidio, the grave digger, as our natives call him," Finnerty added. "Even that chubby little cuss is enlarged mythologically." He turned to Mahadua, and in answer to a question the latter, drawing up to the Major's stirrup, said: "Yes, sahib, the ghor kidio comes up out of the Place of Terrors on dark nights and carries away women and children. Near my village, which is Gaum, one lived in the hills so close that he was called the 'Dweller at the Hearth.' A sahib who made a hunt of a month there broke the evil spell by some manner of means, for the great grave digger was never seen again."
"Shot him?" Finnerty asked seriously.
"No, sahib, else he would have had pride in showing the one." Then Mahadua dropped back well satisfied with the pleasure of converse with the sahibs.
Screened from the sun's glare, but warming to his generous heat, the forest held an indescribable perfume—the nutty, delicious air which, drawn into expanded lungs, fills one with holy calm, with the delight of being, of living, and so they rode in silent ecstasy, wrapped in the mystic charm of the Creator's work.
An hour of travel and they met a party of Finnerty's men carrying one of their number slung from a bamboo pole. He had been mauled by the black leopard. The story was soon told. The whole party with Bahadar had moved forward on Moti's trail, stopping when they felt she was near, the men spreading out with the object of bringing her in. In one of these encircling movements they had surrounded, without knowing it, the black leopard, and, in breaking through, the vicious animal had mauled one so that he would probably die.
The shikari, after he had asked the locality of this encounter, said: "It is toward Kohima."
"This shows that he is not a spirit, Mahadua; that he hasn't dissolved into air."
"Still, sahib, a spirit, leopard or tiger, can always change back."
"It proves to me," Swinton declared, "that there's an exit to that cave which we did not discover."
They had forgotten Lord Victor's presence, but the young man said blithely: "I say, I heard you two Johnnies had gone out after a leopard this morning. What luck?"
"He got away; he's just mauled this man. And it means"—Finnerty turned and faced Swinton—"that we've got to follow him up."
Finnerty's voice had scarcely ceased when the trumpeting of an elephant, loud and shrill, sounded ahead. "That's Raj Bahadar," Finnerty declared. "I expect Moti has come back with another walloping."
They urged their horses, and came to where the party had camped through the night, a fresh trail showing that the men had moved on. Following this, they came within hearing of human voices, high-pitched in a babel of commands and exhortations and calls, drowned at times by the trumpet of Bahadar. Emerging from a thick clump of trees, they could see the natives darting and hopping about something that looked like the top of a submarine emerging from the waters.
"Bahadar has fallen into a pit," Finnerty declared.
Before the three sahibs reached Bahadar there was an encouraging "phrut, phrut" from beyond, and Moti's gleaming tusks showed through the jungle; and then the old lady herself halted just beyond the pit for a brief survey, as if to make sure that it wasn't a game to trap her. Then she advanced gingerly, feeling the ground, and thrust out her trunk for Bahadar to grasp with his. The natives saw that Moti had come to help Bahadar and not to belabour him. With sticks and jungle axes some of them started to tear down to a slope the end wall of the pit, while the others gathered sticks and branches and threw them beneath the trapped elephant as a gradually rising stage.
Finnerty dismounted, and, calling a man, said: "While Moti is busy noose both her hind legs, leaving the ropes in the hands of men so that she will not find the strain, and when Bahadar is out fasten them quickly around trees."
Moti was for all the world like the "anchor man" on a tug-of-war team. Clasping the bull elephant's trunk in a close hitch, she leaned her great bulk back and pulled with little grunts of encouragement. Bahadar soon was able to catch his big toes in the partly broken bank, and helped the natives in its levelling.
At last he was out, and seeming to recognise what Moti had done, was rubbing his trunk over her forehead and blowing little whiffs of endearment into her ears, while she stood warily watching the puny creatures who kept beyond reach of a sudden throw of her trunk.
A native with a noose, watching his chance, darted in and slipped it over a forefoot, and Moti, in a second, was moored, fore and aft, to strong trees. Either in a cunning wait or from a feeling of resignation to fate, she put up no fight beyond a querulous "phrump, phrump!" as if she would say: "My reward, you traitors!"
Bahadar was cut about the legs, for the pit, being an elephant trap dug by Nagas who captured elephants for their meat and ivory, was studded with upright bamboo spears, and, unlike the local pits with their sloped sides, its walls were perpendicular to its full depth of ten feet.
"Tell me why you left the main trail, and how Bahadar stepped into this pit?" Finnerty demanded of Gothya, the mahout.
"We heard the bell, sahib——"
"Fool!" and Finnerty pointed to Moti's neck, on which was nothing.
"We all heard it, sahib, and some talk between a voice and Moti, who would answer back 'E-e-eu-eu—phrut! E-e-eu-eu—phrut!' as though she were saying, 'Wait, brother!' No doubt, sahib, it was a jungle spirit that was drawing Moti along for our destruction, for, as we followed this old Naga trail, Bahadar suddenly went through the covering of leaves and dead limbs that was over the pit."
It was now past noon, and Finnerty said: "We'll have tiffin, a rest-up, and, with Mahadua, make a wide cast toward the hills to see if we can pick up tracks of the leopard; he's both ugly and hungry, so will do something to betray himself. We'll leave Moti here with the party—the tie-up will quiet her—until we return."
A leg chain was fastened from one of Moti's front feet to a hind foot, which would shorten her stride should it so happen that by any chance she broke away again.
PART FOUR
Chapter XVIII
Mahadua, the hunter guide, led the three sahibs always in the direction of Kohima, sometimes finding a few pugs in soft earth. About three o'clock two natives overtook them, their general blown condition suggesting that their mission was urgent.
"I am Nathu, the shikari," one said, "and the Debta of Kohima has sent for the sahib to come and destroy a black leopard who has made the kill of a woman, for my gun—that is but a muzzle-loader—is broken. It is the man-eater who was taken from Kohima by the rajah, and is now back; he has cunning, for a spirit goes with him, sahib. Three women were drying mhowa blooms in the sun, and they sat up in a machan to frighten away jungle pig and deer who eat these flowers; perhaps they slept, for there was no outcry till the leopard crawled up in the machan and took the fat one by the throat and carried her off."
"How far is Kohima?" Finnerty asked.
"It is but a few hours' ride. But if the sahib comes he will find the leopard at sunset, for he will come to where the body of the fat woman lies on a hill. Now in the daylight men with spears are keeping him away till I bring the sahib for the kill. The sahibs can ride to Kohima, for there is a path."
When they arrived at Kohima, the village sat under a pall of dread, and their advent was hailed with delight. An old woman bent her forehead to Finnerty's stirrup, wailing: "Sahib, it is the daughter of Sansya who has been taken, and an evil curse rests over my house, for before, by this same black devil, was taken a son."
"We'll get busy because night will soon be upon us," Finnerty said to his companions.
They were led on foot to an almost bare plateau, and Nathu, pointing to the spearsmen fifty yards ahead, said: "The body is there, sahib, and as the sun goes behind the hills the leopard will come back to eat. He is watching us from some place, for this is his way. Here he can see without being seen."
They beheld a grewsome sight—the body of the slain woman.
"This black devil has the same trick of devouring his kill in the open as the Gharwalla man-eater had," Finnerty declared; "but I see no cover for a shot." He gazed disconsolately over the stony plateau with neither rock nor tree breaking its surface. "There is no cover," he said to Mahadua, and when the shikari repeated this to Nathu, the latter answered: "There is cover for the sahib," pointing to a thick clump of aloe with swordlike leaves, twenty yards away. "My men will cut the heart out of that so that the sahib may rest within. Even if the beast is wounded he will not be foolish enough to thrust his body against those spears."
Nathu spoke, and two men came forward from a group that had lingered back on the path, and with sharp knives lashed to bamboo handles cut an entrance and a small chamber in the aloe.
Finnerty laughed. "That is a new one on me, but it will probably deceive even that black devil; he would notice anything new here the size of a cricket bat."
"Huzoor," Nathu advised, "the leopard is watching us from some place, but, cunning as he is, he cannot count; so, while we are all here, the one who is to make the kill will slip into the machan and we will go away, leaving the woman who is now dead beyond doubt. And as to his scent, sahib, I have brought a medicine of strong smell that all of his kind like, and I have put some where the woman lies and within the aloe machan, so his nose will not give him knowledge of the sahib's presence."
"It is your game, Lord Victor," Finnerty said. "We'll go in a body to the aloe, and you, taking my 10-bore, slip quickly into your cubby-hole. Squat inside as comfortably as you can, with your gun trained absolutely on the body, and wait till the leopard is lined dead with your sights; don't move to get a bead on him or he'll twig you."
Nathu followed the sahibs, dropping on their trail from a bison horn a liquid that had been decocted from the glands of an otter for the obliteration of the sahib scent; the taint of natives would not alarm the leopard, experience having taught him that when he charged they fled.
As Gilfain sat behind the sabre-leafed wall of aloe he bent down a strong-fibred shoot to obtain a good rest for the heavy 10-bore, and an opening that gave him a view of the dead body of the woman. Beyond the plateau the jungle, fading from emerald green, through purple, to sable gloom as the sun slid down behind a western hill, took on an enshroudment of mystery. A peacock, from high in a tamarisk that was fast folding its shutter leaves for the night, called discordantly. A high-shouldered hyena slouched in a prowling semicircle back and forth beyond the kill, his ugly snout picking from the faint breeze its story of many scents. Closer and closer the hyena drew in his shuffling trot, till suddenly, with head thrown up as if something had carried to his ear, he stood a carved image of disgusting contour against a gold-tinted sky shot with streamers of red. Then, with a shrunken cringe of fear, he slipped away and was gone.
From the jungle something like a patch of its own gloom came out upon the blurred plateau. As the thing turned to sweep along the jungle edge the fading sky light glinted on two moonstones that were set in its shadowy form.
The watcher now knew what it was. His heart raced like a motor. At the base of his skull the tightening scalp pricked as though an etcher were at work. His tongue moistened parchment-dry lips. His fingers beat a tattoo upon the triggers of the gun. It was not fear; it was just "It," the sensation that comes to all.
More wily even than the ghoulish hyena, the leopard worked his way toward the spot of his desire. Belly to earth, he glided for yards; then he would crouch, just a darkening patch on the surface; sometimes he sat up—a black boulder. Thirty yards across from the body, he passed beyond it to catch in his nostrils the gently stirring wind that sifted through the aloe blades to where, once more flat to earth, he waited while his sixth sense tabulated the taints.
Lord Victor's eye, trained along the barrels, saw nothing definite; he felt a darkening of the ground where the woman lay, but no form grew in outlines. Suddenly there was a glint of light as if from a glowworm; that must be the leopard's eyes. Then—Gilfain must have moved his gun—there was the gleam of white teeth fair in line with the sights as the leopard snarled with lifted head.
Inspiration pulled the triggers—once, twice! The gun's roar was followed by the coughing growl of the writhing leopard. With a dulled, automatic movement the man jammed two cartridges into the gun, and with foolish neglect of sense scrambled from his cage, the razor edge of an aloe leaf slitting his cheek, and ran to where, beside the woman's body, lay dead the one who had slain her.
An instinct rather than reason flashed across Gilfain's still floating mind, a memory of Finnerty's precaution at the death of Pundit Bagh, and, holding both barrels cocked, he prodded the still twitching black body; but, now released from trivial things, the leopard lay oblivious of this.
Torches flickered in wavy lines where the village path topped the plateau, and a crunch of hurrying feet was heard. To reassure them Lord Victor cried a cheery, "Hello! Whoop-ah!"
When Finnerty and Swinton arrived at the head of a streaming procession a soft glow of satisfied victory loosened Gilfain's tautened nerves, and he babbled of the joy of slaying man-eaters till cut short by the major's: "Well, this act is finished, so we'll get back."
Mahadua was already busy. The leopard was quickly triced to a pole, and they were back in Kohima. Then there was ritual, for the hillmen of the jungle have their ways, and the killing of a man-eater is not of daily habit, and Mahadua, knowing all these things, had to collect a levy.
The slain one was deposited in front of the debta's house, and Mahadua, with some fantastic gyrations supposed to be a dance, collected a rupee from the headman, also from the villagers flour and ghee and honey, for that was the custom when a man-eater was slain.
Six strong carriers, each armed with a torch, were supplied by the debta to bear the trophy, slung from a bamboo, down to the next village, which was Mayo Thana.
For the sahibs milk and rice cakes and honey were supplied, and their praises sounded as demigods. Lord Victor, as he sat on a block of wood that was a grain mortar, found his knees in the thin, bony arms of an old woman whose tears of gratitude splashed upon the hand with which he patted her arm. She was Sansya, the slain woman's mother.
As they left Kohima, the carriers waving their torches in rhythmic lines of light, the leader sent his powerful voice echoing down the slopes in a propitiatory song to the god of the hills, which also conveyed an order to Mayo Thana to prepare a relay of bearers.
Weirdly mystic the torch-lighted scene, the leader's voice intoning the first line, and the others furnishing the chorus as they sang:
"God of our Hills!
Ho-ho, ho-ho!
The leopard is slain!
Ho-ho, ho-ho!
To thee our praise!
Ho-ho, ho-ho!"
To the flowing cadence of this refrain the six bearers of the leopard trotted down the mountain path in rhythmic swing.
At Mayo Thana, a mile down, and at Mandi, half a mile beyond, thrifty Mahadua collected his tithe as master of the hunt, and obtained torch-bearers, the lot from Mandi having the task of shouldering the burden till the elephant party was reached.
For an hour they travelled among heavy-bodied creepers and massive trees when, through the solemn stillness, echoed the far-off tinkle of a bell. Without command, Mahadua stood silently in the path, his head turned to listen. Five seconds, ten seconds—the sahibs sitting their saddles as silent as their guide, and again, now unmistakable, to their ears floated the soft note that Finnerty had likened to the clink of ice in a glass.
Mahadua, holding up his torch so that its light fell upon Finnerty's face, turned his eyes questioningly.
"It is Moti's bell?" Finnerty said, query in his voice.
"Yes, sahib; but it is not on Moti's neck, because it would not just speak and then remain silent, and then speak and then remain silent, for in the jungle her pace would keep it at tongue all the time."
Then, listening, they waited. Again they heard it, and again there was silence.
"Easy, easy!" Finnerty commanded, and, moving with less speed than before, they followed Mahadua.
As they came to a break in the forest where some hills had burst through its gloomed shroud to lift their rocky crests into the silver moonlight, Finnerty heard, nearer now, the bell, and, startled by its unfamiliar note, a jackal, sitting on his haunches on the hilltop, his form outlined against the moonlit sky, threw up his head to send out a faint, tremulous cry. The plaintive wail was caught up as it died away by another jackal, and then another—they were like sentinels calling from posts in a vast semicircle; then with a crashing crescendo of screaming yelps all broke into a rippling clamour that suggested they fled in a pack.
"Charming!" Lord Victor commented. "Topping chorus!"
In the hush that followed this jackal din, Finnerty could hear the tinkling bell. "Does it come up this path?" he asked the shikari.
"Yes, sahib, and I thought I heard Moti laugh."
The major turned to Swinton. "I've got a presentiment that somebody—probably the man that stuck a knife into Baboo Dass' thief—having the bell, has got Moti away from my fellows and is leading her up this path to the hills. I'm going to wing him." He slipped from the saddle, his 10-bore in hand. "Of course, if I can get my clutches on him——" He broke off to arrange action. "Put out the torch, Mahadua, and have your match box ready to light it in a second. You two chaps had better turn your horses over to the syces. With Mahadua I'll keep in advance."
Mahadua, putting his little hand up against Finnerty's chest, checked at a faint, rustling, grinding sound that was like the passing of sandpaper over wood. Finnerty, too, heard it. Perhaps a leopard had forestalled them in waylaying the one who had signalled his approach; or perhaps the one had stilled the telltale sapphire tongue, and was near. No, it tinkled, a score or more yards beyond. The shikari's hand clutched spasmodically in a steadying grip of Finnerty's coat; there was a half-stifled gasp from its owner as two lurid eyes weaved back and forth in the black depths in which the path was lost.
Finnerty's iron nerve went slack; his boy days of banshee stories flooded his mind in a superstitious wave as those devilish eyes hovered menacingly ten feet from the ground.
"A spirit!" Mahadua gasped as he crawled his way behind the major.
"Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle!" The sound came just below where the eyes had gleamed; then a smothering cry—the crunching, slipping sound of sandpaper on wood; a rapid clatter of the bell; a noise like the hiss of escaping steam mingled with the crunch of breaking bones; and again the gleaming eyes cut the darkness in sinuous convolutions.
A gasp—a cry of: "Gad, what is it?" came from behind Finnerty, and beyond there was a heavy thud, the clatter of a bamboo pole, as, with cries of horror, the men of Mandi dropped their burden and fled, gasping to each other: "It is the goblin of the Place of Terrors, and if we look upon his eyes we shall become mad!"
In front of Finnerty the jungle was being rent asunder. With a wild trumpet note of battle, drawn by the bell clangor, an elephant crashed through impeding limbs and seized the evil-eyed goblin.
"A light!" Finnerty grabbed the torch, and as it flared to a match that trembled in Mahadua's fingers he thrust it back into the guide's hand, cocking the hammers of his 10-bore.
The resined-torch flare picked out against the grey of Moti's neck a white-and-black necklace, the end of which was wound about a swaying vine, and in the coils, drawn flat like an empty bag, was a man from whose neck dangled a clanging bell.
"A python!" Finnerty cried as he darted forward to get a shot at the wide-jawed head that, swaying back and forth, struck viciously with its hammer nose at Moti's eyes.
The jungle echoed with a turmoil that killed their voices; the shrill, trumpet notes of Burra Moti had roused the forest dwellers; a leopard, somewhere up in the hills, answered the defiant roars; black-faced monkeys, awakened by the din, filled the branches of a giant sal and screamed in anger.
Great as was the elephant's strength, she could not break the python's deadly clasp; she was like a tarpon that fights a bending rod and running reel, for the creeper swayed, and the elastic coils slipped and held and gave and gathered back, until its choking strength brought her to her knees.
