Charging the servants on no account to let the mother discover that her boy was missing, until he returned, Mr. Desborough started in pursuit.
Like most English gentlemen in India, he was a keen sportsman, and loved to hunt the wild hogs in the bamboo swamps, with a party of his friends, and plenty of native trackers and beaters to find the game and drive it out of the thickets.
But he dare not wait to call his friends to his help. He started forth alone with his coolies, to find which way the wolf had gone.
Tall trees were growing on either side of the high-road, upon which his gate opened. A broad ditch behind them drained the road in the rainy season, when floods arose so easily. It was many feet deep; and now the water ran low between its banks, dried up by the great heat. The jackal pack had retired with the growing daylight; the tiger had slunk away before the rising sun. Well might Mr. Desborough shudder and turn away from the remnants of the dead buffalo, as he trembled for the fate of his child. The country all around him was well cultivated. Rice and dall (another kind of grain much grown by the Hindu villagers) covered large fields along the course of the stream. They were interspersed by clumps of trees and groves of date-palms growing amidst patches of jungle and tangle.
But the increasing heat had reduced the watercourse to a succession of glistening pools, connected by a muddy ditch.
Already the hounds were busy among the fringe of bushes which overhung its margin. Mr. Desborough mounted his horse, and galloped after them, with the broad white hat belonging to the lost child in his hand.
He soon came up with the dogs, and whistling them to his side, he leaned down from his saddle, and made them smell the hat and sun-veil (or puggaree) little Carl had worn the evening before.
They sniffed it well over, looked up in their master's face with their keen, intelligent eyes, and started once again in swift pursuit.
They had passed the closed gates of the indigo factory, but encountered one or two of the native workers there, who had risen with the sun, and were watering their fields and gardens before the business of the day began. The district was studded with wells. The water was drawn by bullocks into huge skins.
But they left their skins on the brink of the well, and joined the servants, who were throwing stones among the bushes, and howling with all their might, to make the wolf show.