"A badger!" Lord Victor cried eagerly.
"Kidio, the grave digger, as our natives call him," Finnerty added. "Even that chubby little cuss is enlarged mythologically." He turned to Mahadua, and in answer to a question the latter, drawing up to the Major's stirrup, said: "Yes, sahib, the ghor kidio comes up out of the Place of Terrors on dark nights and carries away women and children. Near my village, which is Gaum, one lived in the hills so close that he was called the 'Dweller at the Hearth.' A sahib who made a hunt of a month there broke the evil spell by some manner of means, for the great grave digger was never seen again."
"Shot him?" Finnerty asked seriously.
"No, sahib, else he would have had pride in showing the one." Then Mahadua dropped back well satisfied with the pleasure of converse with the sahibs.
Screened from the sun's glare, but warming to his generous heat, the forest held an indescribable perfume—the nutty, delicious air which, drawn into expanded lungs, fills one with holy calm, with the delight of being, of living, and so they rode in silent ecstasy, wrapped in the mystic charm of the Creator's work.
An hour of travel and they met a party of Finnerty's men carrying one of their number slung from a bamboo pole. He had been mauled by the black leopard. The story was soon told. The whole party with Bahadar had moved forward on Moti's trail, stopping when they felt she was near, the men spreading out with the object of bringing her in. In one of these encircling movements they had surrounded, without knowing it, the black leopard, and, in breaking through, the vicious animal had mauled one so that he would probably die.
The shikari, after he had asked the locality of this encounter, said: "It is toward Kohima."
"This shows that he is not a spirit, Mahadua; that he hasn't dissolved into air."
"Still, sahib, a spirit, leopard or tiger, can always change back."
"It proves to me," Swinton declared, "that there's an exit to that cave which we did not discover."