"There's really a kind of law about all this—?"
"Very much a law."
After an interval Cadman breathed: "I like it. Oh, yes," he added wearily, "I like it all."
It was soon after that they heard the voices of natives and a face, looking grey in the dawn, peered down. Cadman spoke in a language the native understood:
"Look in the tea-pot and toss down my cigarettes—"
At this instant the tiger protested a second time. The native vanished with the squeak of a fat puppy that falls off a chair on its back. For moments afterward, they heard him calling and telling others the tale of all his born days. Three quarters of an hour elapsed before the long pole, thick as a man's arm, was carefully lowered. Skag guided the butt to the base of the pit, and fixed it there as far as possible from the tiger. This was delicate. His every movement was maddeningly deliberate, the danger, of course, being to put the tiger into a fighting panic.
"Now you climb," Skag said.
"No—"
"It is better so. I am old at these things. He will not leap at you while I am here—"
"You mean he might leap, as you start to shin up the pole—alone?"