“Rama! Rama!”
It was the cry of a coward and miscreant who knows that his last hour of freedom, if not of life, has come: the hour of reckoning for his misdeeds.
For as long as it took his half-paralysed tongue to frame the words, the shark-charmer faced his approaching doom. Then he turned and fled like a frightened cur.
The voice of Captain Leigh rang out on the air clear and full as the note of a bugle:
“After him, lads! Never mind the others! Take the fellow alive!”
Up scrambled the peons in obedience to the command, deploying to right and left in a long, semicircular line as they debouched upon the Rock.
“Forward!”
Off they went at the quick; then, with a wild cheer, broke into a loping run, the extremities of the semicircle closing in as they advanced.
The shark-charmer ran towards the Elephant's head, where the precipice was the loftiest and dizziest of the four, the beach lying full three hundred feet below. Whatever chance of escape he possessed, it assuredly did not lie in that direction. To all human seeming his escape was an utter impossibility. So thought the peons, and slackened speed, though the extremities of the living, steel-crested semicircle still closed in and in. Between, and somewhat ahead, ran the shark-charmer. He could not run much farther; the brink of the precipice was only a few yards away. He was caught!
What the thoughts of the guilty, hunted wretch were during those awful moments, God alone knows.