"Look," will whisper your shikari as he sinks silently to the ground; and look you do with all your eye-power, and yet fail to see the spotted deer gazing at you, motionless from sheer fright, only a few yards away in the undergrowth, so at one is the animal's colouring with the dappled shadows on the leaves.
What depths of humiliation you plumb when the deer flees to safety through the trees and your shikari sighs.
Leonie as a gun had proved a dire, undiluted failure.
As a companion no one could beat her. Nothing tired her, nothing dismayed her. The terrific heat, the untoward hours and meals, the sting of mosquito, and the rip of the thorn left her unmoved.
She and Edna Talbot had gleefully climbed the ladder up to one of the two suapattah huts, which are a kind of shelter of leaves built for the sundri wood collector upon high platforms near the water, and in which they had passed their first vermin-stricken night. They had climbed cheerfully down the next morning without a word of complaint about the hours of torture they had endured as they sat at the hut door in the light of the moon, whiling away the time until the jungle cocks should crow by watching various shapes come down to the creek to drink.
But the first time a deer, hypnotised by fear or curiosity, had stood stock-still before her, simply asking for death, Leonie put her gun down and shook her head.
"I can't," she said sturdily. "I simply could not kill except in self-defence."
And although young Dean sighed lugubriously over his lady's defalcation, Jan Cuxson adored her utterly for her womanliness, and translated the remark the head shikari made as he handed back to the mem-sahib the rifle he had examined.
"He says he knows that in time of need you would be brave, and would have no fear even of a man-eater, but he says that you must carry your rifle because you can never tell in the jungle what may be awaiting you round the next corner."
As none of the party knew that the temple stood well hidden but quite close to the edge of one of the smallest creeks, open only to the narrowest native craft, they had no idea they were being taken there by a most circuitous route; and the shikari who did know thought that the silent guide was doing it purposely in order to give the sahibs an opportunity to add yet more to the ever-increasing bag of odds-and-ends, also to his backsheesch later on.