During the heat of the day there was a halt once more, the Malays staring at the sailors and soldiers sitting about under the trees for a quiet smoke and watching the elephants, which, being relieved of their pads and howdahs, walked straight into a great pool near to which they were halted, and then cooled themselves by drawing their trunks full of water and squirting it all over their sides.
“I’m blest,” said one of the Jacks, “if they ain’t the rummest beggars I ever see. Just look at that one, Bill. Lor’ if he ain’t just like a bit o’ annymated hingy rubber.”
“Ah?” said his mate, “you might fit a pair o’ blacksmith’s bellows on to the muzzle o’ that trunk of his, and then blow him out into a balloon.”
“When are we going to begin to hunt tigers?” said another. “Oh, we ain’t going to hunt them at all, only keep ’em from coming by us, and driving ’em up to where the orficers are.”
“I say,” said another sailor, “this here’s all very well, but suppose some time or another, when these Malay chaps have got us out into the middle of these woods, they turn upon us, and whip out their krises—what then?”
“What then?” said a soldier, who heard him; “why then we should have to go through the bayonet exercise in real earnest; but it won’t come to that.”
Two more days were spent in the journey, and then, upon his guests beginning to manifest some impatience, the sultan announced that they were now on the borders of the tiger country; and that afternoon there were preparations for a beat when a couple of tigers were seen, but they managed to escape.
The sultan smilingly told his guests that at the end of another march the game would be more plentiful; and once more there was a steady tramp along one of the narrow jungle-paths, into a country wilder than ever—for they were away from the rivers now, and no traces of cultivation had been seen.
There was no dissatisfaction, though, for if the officers shot no tigers they found plenty of jungle-fowl and snipe, upon which they tried their powers with the gun, and made goodly bags of delicious little birds to add to the daily bill of fare.
Another day, and still another, in which the expedition penetrated farther and farther into the forest wild. The officers were delighted, and Doctor Bolter in raptures. He had obtained specimens of the atlas moth, a large flap-winged insect, as large across as a moderate dish; he had shot sun-birds, azure kingfishers, gapers, chatterers, parroquets; and his last achievement had been to kill a boa-constrictor twenty-four feet long.