Captain Guise did not feel satisfied. He saw that his young friend was relying on the strength of his own resolutions, and in so doing was leaning on a reed. He could not, however, say anything more just then, and Norman Stanley started a new subject to give a turn to the conversation.
"By the by, Captain Guise, I've not shown you the prize which I captured yesterday. As Dugsley and I were beating about in the jungle, what should we light upon but a tiger-cub—a real little beauty, pretty and playful as a young kitten."
"What did you make of it?" asked the captain.
"Oh, I've tethered it to the tree yonder," said Norman, pointing to one not a hundred yards distant. "By good luck, I had a dog's chain and collar which fitted the little creature exactly. I mean to try if I can't rear it, and keep a tiger-cub as a pet."
"A tiger-cub is rather a dangerous pet, I should say," observed Captain Guise, with a smile.
"Oh, not a bit of it!" cried Norman lightly. "The little brute has no fangs to bite with, and if it had, the chain is quite strong enough to—"
The sentence was never finished, for while the last word was yet on the smiling lips of the youth, the sudden sound of a savage roar from a neighbouring thicket made him start, turn pale, and grasp his gun more firmly. Forth from the shade of the bushes sprang a large tigress. In a minute, with a few bounds, she had cleared the space between herself and her cub! Snap went the chain, as the strong wild beast caught up her little one in her mouth; and before either Norman or the captain (who had snatched up a second gun) had time to take aim, the tigress was off again, bearing away her rescued cub to the jungle!
"That was a sight worth seeing!" exclaimed Captain Guise. "I never beheld a more splendid creature in all my life!"
Norman, who was very young, and quite unaccustomed to having a tiger so near him with no iron cage between them, looked as though he had not enjoyed the sight at all. "I should not care to meet that splendid creature alone in the jungle," he observed. "Did you not notice how the iron chain snapped like a thread at the jerk which she gave it?"
"Yes," replied Captain Guise, as he turned back into the tent; "what will hold in the cub, is as a spider's web to the full-grown wild beast. You had, as I told you, a dangerous pet, Norman Stanley. You might play for a while with the young creature, but claws will lengthen and fangs will grow. And," the captain added more gravely, "this is like some other things which are at first but a source of amusement, but which are too likely to become at last a source of destruction."