It was in rounding an old sunny corner in silent disappointment at again failing to find Chakrata. Young Browne, riding first, noticed a loose pebble rattle down the side of the rock. Mrs. Browne insists that she did not notice the pebble, and I don’t know that it is important to her evidence that she should. But she certainly noticed the leopard, so carefully that she never will be quite sure it wasn’t a tiger. She saw it rise from its four legs from a ledge of rock above young Browne’s head and look at young Browne. Mrs. Browne is naturally unable to give anyone an accurate idea of her emotion during the instant that followed, but she was perfectly certain that it did not occur to young Browne to transfix the animal with his eye, and he had nothing else. Neither it did, but the situation did not find Mr. Browne entirely without presence of mind notwithstanding. Raising his whip in a threatening manner Mr. Browne said “Shoo!” and whatever may have been the value of that expletive in Mr. Browne’s mouth under ordinary circumstances, in Mrs. Browne’s opinion it saved his life on that occasion. For without even an answering growl the leopard turned and trotted into the thicket quickly, as if she had forgotten something.
“Did you see that, Helen?” inquired her husband, turning in his saddle.
“I sh-should think I did?” exclaimed Mrs. Browne. “W-w-w-wait for me, George!” And as the Diagram came up alongside, young Browne received several tearful embraces, chiefly upon his arm, in the presence of the syces. “I told you you ought to have a g-g-gun, darling, and you wouldn’t be advised,” Mrs. Browne reproached him hysterically. “It’s all very well to laugh, but thin-thin-think of what might have been!”
“It’s awful to think of what might have been if I had had a gun,” said young Browne solemnly. “In the excitement of the moment I should have been certain to let it go off, and then she would have been down on us, sure. They hate guns awfully. Oh, we may be thankful I hadn’t a gun!”
CHAPTER XXVI.
PRESENTLY they met a wonderfully pretty lady with red cheeks, such red cheeks as all the Miss Peacheys had in Canbury, being swung along in a dandy on the shoulders of four stout coolies. The red cheeks belonged to Chakrata; they were within half a mile of it then; they would see it before the sun went down. The road zig-zagged a bit and climbed more steeply, narrowing hideously here and there. The khuds became terrific. Young Browne dismounted and walked at his wife’s bridle, pushing her pony close to the mountainside. The precipices seemed to shout to them.
There was a last outstanding brown flank; the road hurtled round it, over it, and then with the greeting of a mighty torrent of wind that seemed to come from the other side of the world it ran out upon a wide level place, where a band played and five hundred soldiers, in Her Majesty’s red, wheeled and marched and countermarched, it seemed to the Brownes, for pure light-heartedness. That was the end; there, grouped all about a crag or two, was Chakrata. There across a vast heaving of mountains to the horizon—mountains that sank at their feet and swelled again and again and again purple and blue—stood the still wonder of the Snows.
“They aren’t real,” said Helen simply, “they’re painted on the sky.”
The Brownes followed a path that twisted through Chakrata, and in course of time they came to a little out-cropping wooden diamond-paned chalet, with wide brown eaves that overhung eternity and looked toward the Snows. It was a tiny toy dâk-bungalow, and English dahlias, red and purple and yellow and white, grew in clumps and thickets tall and wild around it. Here they entered in and demanded a great fire and a cake; while a grey furred cloud, flying low with her sisters, blotted out the Snows, and darkness, coming up from the valleys, caught them upon the mountain-top.