Hester fell a-thinking, and the talk went on without her. She never heard the end of the story, but was roused by the laughter that followed it.
"It was no tiger at all—that was the joke of the thing," said the major. "There was a roar of laughter when the brute—a great lumbering floundering hyena, rushed into the daylight. But the barrel of my rifle was bitten together as a schoolboy does a pen—a quill-pen, I mean. They have horribly powerful jaws, those hyenas."
"And what became of the man-eater?" asked Mark, with a disappointed look.
"Stopped in the hole till it was safe to come out and go on with his delicate meals."
"Just imagine that horrible growl behind you, as if it came out of a whole mine of teeth inside!"
"By George! for a young lady," said the major, "you have an imagination! Too much of that, you know, won't go to make you a good hunter of tigers!"
"Then you owe your coolness to want of imagination?" suggested Hester.
"Perhaps so. Perhaps, after all," returned the major, with a merry twinkle in his eye, "we hunters are but a set of stupid fellows—too stupid to be reasonably frightened!"
"I don't mean that exactly. I think that perhaps you do not know so well as you might where your courage comes from. For my part I would rather be courageous to help the good than to destroy the bad."
"Ah, but we're not all good enough ourselves for that," said the major, with a serious expression, and looking at her full out of his clear eyes, from which their habitual twinkle of fun had for the moment vanished. "Some of us are only fit to destroy what is yet worse than ourselves."