"Do you think by any chance he had an inkling Lord Victor was going there, and didn't want him to know we'd be there?"
"No. He says we saw no one because we spoiled the hunt by going like a marriage procession; that we went by the road, and that his brother, the watchman, saw Prince Ananda watching us, both going and coming."
"The sahib will have rested now, and the sun is hot," the Banjara interposed.
Finnerty, rising, placed the men; Swinton behind the flat boulder he had sat on, and from the top of which his gun would range the cave mouth; two convenient trees were allotted to Mahadua, the herdsman, and his brother when the dogs had been slipped. Finnerty would stand on some ground a little higher where he could rake the nala, both up and down, should the leopard bolt.
The dogs had been given a noseful of the leopard's trail, and, when they were slipped, with a chorus of yelps they made for the cave, while their owner slipped nimbly to his allotted tree. It was a tense moment; the Banjara, perched on the lower limb of a mhowa, was avariciously hoping the leopard would kill the whole pack, for at ten rupees a head they were better dead.
Mahadua's face grew grave as, instead of the tumult of a fierce battle, stillness held within the cavern; the eager yelps of the dogs as they had scrambled over lose stones to enter the cave had ceased. The leopard was, no doubt, a spirit, and had perhaps hushed the dogs. At any rate, a flesh-and-blood leopard would now be giving battle and voices of pain and passion would be filling the cavern with cries.
Finnerty was muttering: "Damn if I can make it out; it's a rummy go!"
At that instant the pack came stringing out, and the leader stood looking wonderingly at the sahibs.
"They are afraid," Mahadua jeered; "they went in thinking it was a hare. Oh, they are a true Banjara pack!"
The herdsman put a hand on a long knife in his belt, and with fury in his eyes said: "Will the Presence take a slipper to this monkey's mouth or shall I open its windpipe? The leopard is not within, for my dogs do not lie."