Volume Three—Chapter Twenty Seven.
Chakra Trimming his Lamp.
Day was dawning when the tiger Chakra returned to his lair in the Duppy’s Hole. With him night was day, and the dawn of the morn the twilight of evening.
He was hungry: having eaten only a morsel of food since starting out on his awful errand, just twenty-four hours ago.
The remains of a pepper-pot, still unemptied from the iron skillet in which it had been cooked, stood in a corner of the hut.
To warm it up would require time, and the kindling of a fire. He was too much fatigued to be fastidious; and, drawing the skillet from its corner, he scooped up the stew, and ate it cold.
Finally, before retiring to rest, he introduced into his stomach something calculated to warm the cold pepper-pot—the “heel-tap” of a bottle of rum that remained over from the preceding night; and then, flinging himself upon the bamboo bedstead, so heavily that the frail reeds “scrunched” under his weight, he sank into a profound slumber.
He lay upon his hunched back, his face turned upward. A protuberance on the trunk of the tree, of larger dimensions than that upon his own person, served him for a bolster—a few handfuls of the silk cotton laid loosely upon it constituting his pillow.
With his long arms extended loosely by his side—one of them hanging over until the murderous fingers rested upon the floor—and his large mouth, widely agape, displaying a double serrature of pointed, shining teeth, he looked more like some slumbering ogre than a human being.