So, seeing at a glance that something lay beneath the surface of the bitter hatred in the dark face, and the wild, wicked rage of the white one, I said, quickly. "Seek! my brother!"
Ganêsh swayed forward, his trunk curling like a snake, his wicked little eyes alert, a faint frou-frou of a blowing sound seeming to quiver the grasses; and there, grasped softly in the prehensile end was a dead jack snipe! As he put it deferentially and politely into my outstretched hand I seemed to catch a contemptuous flicker in his eye, as who would say, "What an amount of fuss about such a very little piece of pork," as the Jew said when a thunderstorm found him eating sausage.
But that it was not a little piece of pork between those two, still glaring at each other, was evident.
Mahadeo's usually gentle face had taken on a stony stare that held in it something of limitless power; while Nat Gwynne's anger was almost obscured by sheer disgust at having to keep his hands off another man's servant.
"By God!" he cried. "It's lucky for you, you pig, that I'm not your master--but--but I'll try to be--I'll buy this big brute when they sell the bankrupt State up next month, and I'll buy you, curse you, and I'll ..."
"Do hold your tongue, Gwynne," I said to him in a low voice, for his temper was notorious, and once he lost control over himself he would often behave like a madman. As, indeed, he had every right to be, since the record of the Gwynnes of Garthgwynne was a black one.
Mahadeo, however, supplied the return to calm.
"The Huzoor is mast," he said to me, rapidly in low contemptuous Hindustani, turning the while to sit, immovable as ever, a mere head and trunk of a man, all else being hidden by the elephant's great shields of ears. "He is as the beasts that perish. And Ganêsh, too, nears his time of power--" he pointed to the great head he bestrode where, oozing apparently from a slight hollow in the skin a few drops of ichor showed, half hardened into amber, "so let those who would harm him--or his friends beware!"
But there was nothing of which to be beware thereinafter, for all became peace. How hot the sun was! And the guns, too! Almost too hot to hold. But how cool it was in the camp down in a mango-grove beside a tank with great cane brakes stretching away into the stars under the moonlight! And how peaceful! How one slept, and slept, and slept, drowsed to dreamlessness by the great peace of the immovable shadows, the greater peace of the light behind them....
Ye powers above! What was that? Even now, remembering it, all was as it had seemed then. Shadow on light, light on shadow ... a curse, a cry ... something young and slim fleeing, half in light, half in shadow! Then a sudden trumpet, a rattle as of chained front feet, one little sob....