It was a motley crowd, indeed, which awaited the fiat of the Dispenser of Justice in these fastnesses of the central hills of India; those climbing, rolling upward sweeps of sandstone where the ripple mark of the tides that built them remains to tell of the vanished sea which had once covered this dry and thirsty land, where no water is for nine long months of the year.
It was a curious crowd also. It could not fail of being that, since it struck the two extremes of that vast Indian scale of so-called culture, so-called civilisation. For a land case involving several miles of country was in dispute, and the semi-Europeanised, wholly clothed lawyers engaged on it stood cheek by jowl with the semi-clothed wholly aboriginal witnesses in it; representatives for the most part of the wild tribes belonging to these waste lands and forests. Rude iron-smelters, almost touching the bronze age in absolute savagery; or wandering fowlers, barbaric even to the extent of eating their poor, old, undesirable relations!
In one group, however, consisting of an old man and a young one, a quick observer might have noticed a palpable discrepancy between the dress (or the lack of it) and the address of the wearers. A discrepancy which made the magistrate of the district look up with a smile.
"Hullo! Nâgdeo!" he said. "On the warpath after a tiger?" The old man salaamed down to the ground. His skin was very dark, so that his white moustache and thin white whiskers, brushed out to stand, each hair singly, in a forward curve, like the whiskers of a cat, seemed to glisten against it. For the rest, he was small, slight, but extremely muscular, and he carried himself with no little dignity and importance.
"Not so, Huzoor," he replied, and his speech rose higher in that scale of culture and civilisation than his dress, which was no more than a waistcloth, a string of tiger claws, and a tasselled spear--"I come to put another foot on it. This is my grandson, Huzoor."
The dignity, the importance grew fifty-fold as he turned to the lad by his side. A good head taller, fairer of skin, infinitely better looking, there was yet something about the figure which made the eye turn back to the smaller, older one, as it stood before authority with a certain authority of its own.
He was, as all knew, explained Nâgdeo, the keeper of one of the wildest passes in that wild country, as his father and his father's father had been. Who could deny it? Was not their very caste name, to distinguish them from others, Ghâtwâl, or pass-keeping ones?
He had had to keep his a long time, because the Old God had decreed that his son should be defeated by a tigress and her cubs; which might happen to the best of pass-keeping ones, since those things feminine were untrustworthy. Consequently he (Nâgdeo) had had to go on beyond the years of greatest activity until his grandson reached them.
But here the boy was now. Of age, twenty; than most, taller; as any, learned in jungle law; with the spear, nimble; to keep the pass, ready; to be enrolled, present, the Old God before--
With his subject the old man's words had returned to the idiom of a wilder tongue, and he drew out of his waistcloth a little iron image of a tiger, not three inches long, to which he salaamed reverently.