"Shall we have tales, Sahib?"
Skag roused from a moment's abstraction to answer:
"Bhanah, I don't remember anything I could talk about to-night, but the hunting cheetah—Nels got."
"The hunting cheetah is one, Sahib; there are many. Telling is in knowledge and in speech; finding is in the man. I will tell, if the Sahib pleases; but he shall find."
So they had tales that night.
CHAPTER VIII
The Monster Kabuli
Skag had learned, in finding Carlin, that it wasn't like a man in America finding the one particular and inimitable girl, not even if she were the laurus nobilis and he the eagle of the same coin. In India, where people have pride of race, and time to keep it shining, there are formalities. . . . The two had arranged to meet in the jungle—not deep in the glen where the tiger had coughed, but at the edge toward Hurda, when Skag returned from Poona. He was to go straight into the jungle from the railway station. Carlin would be watching and follow there. . . .
Sanford Hantee of the Natural Research Department, after much opportunity to wrestle with the subtle and gritty and hard-testing demon of delay, came at last to Hurda again, and stepped out of the coach with a throb in his chest and a knot in his throat which only the best and bravest soldiers have brought in from the field. As the moments of waiting at the edge of the jungle passed, it dawned upon him that something had happened, or Carlin already would be with him, at least crossing the big sun-shot area from the walled city. . . . What had happened is this story of the monster Kabuli, which is an animal story even without the entrance of the racing elephant, Gunpat Rao.
Many months before, five merchants came in from far Kabul and sat down in the market-place at Hurda, day by day unfolding more of their packs. They brought nuts from High Himalaya, foot-hill raisins and the long white Kabuli grapes themselves, packed in cotton, a dozen to fifteen in the box. Then there were dried figs and dates, pomegranates picked up far this side of the Hills, Kabuli weaves of cloth, and silks inwoven with gold thread. They were small packs, but worth a great price; which is important to relate in any company.