“Scuppered!” said John Chinn, watching the flight. “Now if he was a partridge he’d tower. Lungs must be full of blood.”
The brute had jerked himself over a boulder and fallen out of sight the other side. John Chinn looked over with a ready barrel. But the red trail led straight as an arrow even to his grandfather’s tomb, and there, among the smashed spirit-bottles and the fragments of the mud image, the life left, with a flurry and a grunt.
“If my worthy ancestor could see that,” said John Chinn, “he’d have been proud of me. Eyes, lower jaw, and lungs. A very nice shot.” He whistled for Bukta as he drew the tape over the stiffening bulk.
“Ten—six—eight—by Jove! It’s nearly eleven—call it eleven. Fore-arm, twenty-four—five—seven and a half. A short tail, too: three feet one. But what a skin! Oh, Bukta! Bukta! The men with the knives swiftly.”
“Is he beyond question dead?” said an awe-stricken voice behind a rock.
“That was not the way I killed my first tiger,” said Chinn. “I did not think that Bukta would run. I had no second gun.”
“It—it is the Clouded Tiger,” said Bukta, un-heeding the taunt.
“He is dead.”
Whether all the Bhils, vaccinated and unvaccinated, of the Satpuras had lain by to see the kill, Chinn could not say; but the whole hill’s flank rustled with little men, shouting, singing, and stamping. And yet, till he had made the first cut in the splendid skin, not a man would take a knife; and, when the shadows fell, they ran from the red-stained tomb, and no persuasion would bring them back till dawn. So Chinn spent a second night in the open, guarding the carcass from jackals, and thinking about his ancestor.
He returned to the lowlands to the triumphal chant of an escorting army three hundred strong, the Mahratta vaccinator close at his elbow, and the rudely dried skin a trophy before him. When that army suddenly and noiselessly disappeared, as quail in high corn, he argued he was near civilisation, and a turn in the road brought him upon the camp of a wing of his own corps. He left the skin on a cart-tail for the world to see, and sought the Colonel.