"You saved the tiger's life, Lumbani?"
"Surely, sahib. Of the Banjaras some are Mussulmans—outcasts that lot are—and some are Hindus, as is your servant, so we are careful in the matter of a kill, lest we slay one of our own people who has returned. This slayer of my cow always took pleasure in being near the buffalo. Why, huzoor, I have seen him up in the hills looking as though he had felt lonesome without the herd. Noting that, it was in my mind that perhaps a Banjara herdsman had been born again as a tiger. That is why I saved his life from the red dogs of the jungle; nothing can stand before them when they are many. From the back of a buffalo I saw one of these jungle devils standing on high ground, beckoning, with his tail stuck up like a flag, to others of his kind."
"I've seen that trick," Finnerty commented.
"The tiger had been caught in a snare of the Naga people as he came to partake of a goat they had tied up, as he thought, for his eating; the sahib knows of what like a snare is to retain a tiger. A strong-growing bamboo, young and with great spring, had been bent down and held by a trip so that tiger, putting his paw in the noose, it sprang up, and there he was dancing around like a Nautch girl on the rope that held his wrist, being a loose bamboo too big for a grip of his teeth; it spun around on the rope. The red dogs, hearing his roars, knew he was trapped, and were gathering to settle an old dispute as to the eating of a kill. They would have made an end of him. A mongoose kills a cobra because he is too quick for the snake, and they were too quick for the tiger; so, taking pity upon him as an old friend, with my staff I drove them off; then, climbing into the bamboos, cut the rope."
"Did you tackle them alone, Lumbani?"
"Surely, sahib; jungle dogs run from a man that is not afraid."
Finnerty's shikarri, Mahadua the Ahnd, who had come to the verandah, now said: "The tiger this herder of buffalo tells of is 'Pundit Bagh;' he is well known to all."
"And you never brought word that we might make the hunt," Finnerty reproached.
"Sahib, we Ahnd people when we know a tiger is possessed of a spirit do not seek to destroy that one."
"Why is he called Pundit? Is he the ghost of a teacher?"