But circumstances over which she had no control were destined to intervene.
CHAPTER XXI.
FIRE AND SWORD.
“Why, Dugald, where are you off to so early?” cried Lady Haigh, coming out of her tent at breakfast-time, and finding her husband and his boy busy selecting guns, filling powder-flasks, and laying in a store of bullets, flints, percussion-caps, and other necessaries unknown to the sportsman of to-day.
“After the man-eater. They’ve sent me khubber of him at last. It’s right out at Rajkot, so I shall be gone all day, even if I don’t have to wait over to-night. You needn’t get nervous if I do.”
“You might just as well let us come,” she sighed argumentatively.
“I have far too much respect for your life—and mine. If you came you wouldn’t be satisfied without a gun, which would go off of its own accord, like poor Mr Winkle’s, and then—well, I would rather be the tiger than any human being in your neighbourhood.”
“Isn’t he horribly rude, Pen? We don’t want to go pushing through jungle-grass after an old mangy tiger, do we? We are going to engage in light and elegant employments suited to our sex. He knows quite well that if I can’t shoot straight it’s his fault for not having taught me. If only I had had the sense to learn before I came out, I would slip away and get to Rajkot before him, and the first thing he saw when he got there would be a dead tiger.”
“More likely that I should find myself a sorrowing widower,” said Sir Dugald, who was in high good humour at the prospect of getting a sixth tiger. “No, no, stick to your weeds and straws, ladies, and don’t get into mischief while I’m gone. You talked of going out to that dry jheel to the eastward, and you can’t do much harm there. Take Murtiza Khan with you, of course.”
“He’s insufferably proud because he thinks he’s going to bag the man-eater,” said Lady Haigh. “What he will be when he comes back I really can’t imagine. I wish I could bewitch tigers, as that old man in the village says he can. Then I would give this one something that would keep it miles away from Dugald, however far he went.”
Sir Dugald laughed pleasantly over this uncharitable wish as he handed his second gun to the shikari who was to accompany him. The ponies were already saddled, and he had only time for a mouthful of food before starting, his last counsel to his wife being not to venture farther from the camp than the jheel he had mentioned, as the sky was curiously hazy, and he thought the weather was going to break up. The winter rains had been unusually slight this year, so that the country was already beginning to look parched, and the forest foliage, which should still have been soft and fresh, was becoming quite stiff, and what Lady Haigh called “rattly,” though the heat was not yet too great for camping. The climate of Khemistan is so uncertain that a thunderstorm was at least possible; but after Sir Dugald had ridden away to the southward, his wife decided that the haze portended heat rather than thunder, and that it would be perfectly safe to undertake the expedition to the jheel. She and Penelope started soon after breakfast, attended only by their two grooms and Murtiza Khan, a stalwart trooper who was Sir Dugald’s orderly on occasions like the present, when he was in separate command. The jheel proved a disappointment, for it was so dry that the delicate bog-plants Lady Haigh had hoped to secure were all dead, and the grasses were the ordinary coarse varieties to be found all over the country. Lady Haigh and Penelope soon tired of the fruitless search, and sat down to rest on a bank pleasantly scented with sweet basil before taking to the saddle again. They were conscious of a strong disinclination for the ride back, the air was so hot, the track so dusty, and the forest so shadeless.