JUNGLE TALES

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS

“Mrs. Croker has already achieved a secure foothold in that temple of Anglo-Indian fiction whereof Mr. Rudyard Kipling is the high-priest. Her tales have a freshness and piquancy that are all their own.... So long as the author of ‘Diana Barrington’ can produce works of the quality of ‘Village Tales and Jungle Tragedies,’ she will assuredly not lack an audience.”—Athenæum.

“These tales are really original and excellent work. Mrs. Croker knows her India minutely, and proves her knowledge by a thousand delicate touches.”—Woman.

“Mrs. Croker writes of India as one knowing it well, and with deep sympathy for the people among whom her time was spent, for the village sorrows and tragedies she was able to share. And in a considerable measure she succeeds in bringing home to readers at home the daily life of the East.”—Glasgow Herald.

“The stories are all written from a peculiar knowledge of the life they describe, and with a lively eye directed to its picturesqueness. They make an interesting and entertaining book, which will be heartily enjoyed by every one who reads it.”—Scotsman.

“The magician’s car of fiction next transports us to India, the magician being that very competent and attractive writer Mrs. B. M. Croker. Her ‘Village Tales’ are so good that they bracket her, in our judgment, with Mrs. F. A. Steel in comprehension of native Indian life and character.”—Times.

“Mrs. Croker makes the tales interesting and attractive, and her ready sympathy with the Indian people, whom we are gradually coming to know through the interpretation of some of our very best writers, strikes the reader afresh in this volume.”—World.

“Mrs. Croker shows once more a pretty talent, and her volume is replete with sentiment and romance. Her animal stories are really touching.”—Globe.

“Mrs. Croker’s volume is bright and readable. She has done good work already in other fields; one expects a story of hers to be at any rate pleasant reading. These Indian tales are no exception.”—North British Mail.

“Mrs. Croker’s stories show her grasp of Indian character, and her realisation of the nameless charm which casts its glamour over the East and its peoples.... ‘Two Little Travellers,’ the last story, is exquisitely pathetic.”—Star.

“The stories are among the best of their kind. The author knows equally well how to write of Anglo-Indian or purely native life.”—Morning Post.

“Mrs. Croker, who knows India exceptionally well, and is a practised writer, has handled this variety of subjects in a spirited and entertaining style.”—Literary World.

“A prettily got-up book containing seven Indian tales, well told, with abundant evidence of a thorough knowledge of the country and its people.... There is not a dull line in the book, and in its perusal the desire for more keeps growing, even to the end of the last beautiful tale of Indian life.”—Asiatic Quarterly Review.

“Mrs. Croker’s seven little tales of native India are such very quick and easy reading that many persons will probably overlook the skill to which the result is due. The authoress evidently knows both what a short story ought to be, and how to make one.”—Graphic.

“Brilliant pictures of Indian life and manners. Mrs. Croker possesses the pen of a ready writer united to the imagination of a true artist.”—Liberal.

“The tales are simple in themselves and plainly told, with an unmistakable atmosphere of truth and reality about them.”—Guardian.

“The quality of Mrs. Croker’s work is at this time sufficiently well known, and it is enough to say that in her last volume are to be found all those qualities which have secured for its predecessors a welcome at the hands of the public.”—Tablet.

HER BLACK EYES BLAZED WITH EXCITEMENT.

JUNGLE TALES

BY B. M. CROKER

Author of

‘Pretty Miss Neville,’
‘Diana Barrington,’
‘The Spanish Necklace,’
‘In Old Madras,’
etc.

A NEW IMPRESSION
WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY JOHN CHARLTON

LONDON
HOLDEN & HARDINGHAM
1913

“Ah! what a warning for thoughtless man,

Could field or grove, could any spot of earth,

Show to his eye an image of the pangs

Which it hath witnessed!”

Wordsworth.

THESE TALES ARE INSCRIBED
TO
OLD FRIENDS
IN THE CENTRAL AND NORTH-WEST PROVINCES
IN MEMORY OF
MANY PLEASANT HOURS IN CAMP AND CANTONMENT.

B. M. C.

CONTENTS.

VILLAGE TALES
AND
JUNGLE TRAGEDIES.

A FREE-WILL OFFERING.

“Kismiss,” as the natives call it, is anything but a jovial and merry season to me, and I heartily sympathize with those prudent souls who flee from the station or cantonment, and bury themselves afar off in the jungle, until the festive season has been succeeded by the practical New Year! Christmas in India is an expensive anniversary to a needy subaltern such as I am. Putting aside the necessary tips to the mess-servants, the letter-corporal, and colour-sergeant, I have my own retinue (about ten in number), who overwhelm me with wreaths and flowers culled from my garden, and who expect, in return, solid rupees of the realm. This is reasonable enough; but it passes the limits of reason and patience when other peopled body-servants, peons, syces, and all the barrack dhobies, and every “dog” boy in the station, lie in ambush in order to thrust evil-smelling marigolds under my nose, with expectant salaams! Last Christmas cost me nearly the price of a pony—this Christmas, I resolved to fly betimes with my house-mate, Jones of the D.P.W. We would put in for a week’s leave, and eat our plum-pudding at least sixty miles from Kori.

Alas! my thrifty little scheme was knocked on the head by a letter from my cousin Algy Langley. He is the eldest son of an eldest son; I am the younger son of a second son: and whereas I am a sub. in an infantry regiment, grilling on the plains of India, and working for my daily bread, Algy has run out for one cold weather, merely in search of variety and amusement.

“Why on earth should relations think it necessary to meet on one particular day, in order to eat a tasteless bird and an indigestible pudding?”

I put this question to Jones, as we sat in our mutual verandah, opening the midday dâk.

“Just look at this; it’s a beastly nuisance!” and I handed him Algy’s note, which said—

“Dear old Perky (my Christian name is Perkin),—This is to give notice that I am coming to eat my Christmas dinner with you. I arrive on the 21st, per mail train.—Yours,

“A. Langley.”

“What is your cousin like?” inquired Jones.

“Oh, a regular young London swell, who has never roughed it in his life. I suppose I shall have to turn out of my room,” I grumbled; “and I must borrow Robinson’s bamboo cart to meet him, for I believe he would faint if I put him in a bullock tonga at first—he must arrive at that by degrees!”

“Is there no chance of our getting off to Karwassa? Wouldn’t he come and have a try for the man-eater?” urged Jones.

“Not he!” I rejoined emphatically; “he is a lady-killer—that is his only kind of sport. I’m glad I have not put in for my leave; you and I will go later—the tiger will wait.”

“Yes, he has waited a good while,” retorted Jones, sarcastically; “nearly three years, and about a dozen shikar parties have been got up for his destruction, and still he keeps his skin! But, somehow, I have a presentiment that we shall get him.”

The next day Jones and I met Algy at the station. He had brought three servants, a pile of luggage, and looked quite beautiful as he stepped out on the platform, wearing a creaseless suit, Russia-leather boots, gloves, and a white gauze veil to keep off the dust. His handkerchief was suggestive of the most “up-to-date” delicate scent, as he passed it languidly over his forehead, and gave directions to have his late compartment cleared.

As books, an ice-box, fruit, a fan, cushions, and a banjo, were handed out one by one, I gathered, from Jones’s expressive glance, that he granted that my cousin was a hopeless subject for the jungle.

“Well, Perky,” he said, slapping me on the back, “I’ve got everything now—what are you waiting for?”

“Your lady’s-maid,” I promptly answered, as I nodded at the banjo, pillows, and fan.

“I like to be comfortable,” he confessed. “One may as well take one’s ease as not; it has an excellent and soothing effect on the temper.”

But I noticed that he caught sight of Jones’s grin, and coloured deeply—whether with rage or shame, I could not guess. As I drove my guest up to our lines, I secretly marvelled as to what had brought him to our little Mofussil station, a two days’ railway journey through the flattest, ugliest country. He had been staying at Government House, Calcutta, at various splendid Residencies, and had had every opportunity of seeing India from the most commanding and luxurious point of view. Why had he sought me out?

Later on, as we sprawled in long chairs in my portico overlooking a sun-baked compound,—with a view chiefly consisting of the back of my neighbour’s stables, and Jones’s little brown bear, mowing and moping, under a scraggy mango tree,—I put the inevitable question:

“Well, Algy, what do you think of India?”

“Not much,” he answered. “It is not a bit like what I have expected: it is not as Eastern as Egypt. The scenery that I have seen consists of bushes, boulders, and terra-cotta plains. I don’t care about ruins and buildings; what I want to come at are the people and customs of the land—so far, it’s all England, not India: England at the sea-side, dressing, dancing, racing, flirting; clothes are thinner, manners are easier; but it’s England—England—England!”

I did what I could for him. I took him to a garden-party, to call on the beauty of the station, to write his name in the general’s book, to mess, to a soldier’s sing-song; and still he was discontented. He had been faintly amused with our “pot” gardens and trotting bullocks; nevertheless, he continued to grumble in this style—

“Your band plays the last new coster song, your ladies believe that they wear the latest fashions, your men read the latest news not two days old, your servants speak English and speak it fluently. Your butler plays the fiddle, and he told me this morning that my banjo was ‘awfully nice.’ I desire that you will introduce me (if you can) to India without European clothes—stripped and naked. I want to get below the surface, below officialdom, and general orders, and precedence; scrape the skin, and show me Hindostan.”

“Show me something out of the common.” This was his querulous parrot-cry.

“Would you care to come out into the jungle sixty miles away,” I ventured, “to a place that has no English attributes, and help to shoot a notorious man-eating tiger? There is a reward of five hundred rupees for his skin. For the last two years he has devastated the country.”

“Like it!” cried Algy, suddenly, sitting erect, “why, it’s the very thing. I’ll go like a shot. I am ready to start to-night. What’s the name of the place?”

“Karwassa. This man-eater has killed, they say, more than a hundred people, and if we shoot him, we cover ourselves with glory; if we fail, we are no worse than half the regiment, and most of the station.”

Algy figuratively leapt at the idea; he was out of his chair, pacing the verandah, long ere I had ceased to speak.

“How soon could we start?”

“As soon as I obtained leave,” I replied.

“Oh, bother leave!” he retorted, impatiently.

“Still, it is a necessary precaution,” I answered. “If I go without it I shall be cashiered, and that would be a bother.”

“All right; put in for it at once. The sooner we are off the better,” cried Algy. “Let us get the first shikari in the province, and if he puts us fairly on the tiger, the five hundred rupees shall be his. I pay all expenses.”

“But Jones wants——”

“Yes, Jones, by all means,” he interrupted; “you had better lay your heads together without delay. He told me he was a born organizer, so you might, perhaps, leave the transport and commissariat in his hands, whilst you secure leave, and the keenest and best shikari. Money no object.”

“You are keen enough, Algy,” I remarked; “but, of course, you have no experience of big game. Can you shoot?”

“I can hit a stag, and I’ve accounted for crocodile, but I have never seen a tiger in a wild state.”

“Ah! and you’ll find a tiger is quite another pair of shoes,” I assured him impressively.

The day before Christmas we started in the highest spirits. Algy wore a serviceable shikar suit, strong blue putties, and shooting-boots, and looked as workmanlike as possible. Our destination, Karwassa, lay sixty miles due north, and we travelled forty-five miles along the smooth trunk road in a dogcart, with relays of horses, and arrived early in the afternoon at Munser Dâk Bungalow—a neat white building, in a neat little compound, that was almost swallowed up by the surrounding jungle. Here we experienced our first breakdown. Jones prided himself on doing everything on a “system”—but the system failed ignominiously. Our luggage and servants were fifteen miles behind, and we could not proceed that night, so we resigned ourselves into the hands of the Dâk bungalow khansamah, who slew the usual Dâk bungalow dinner for our behoof. There was a fair going on in the village, and we strolled across to inspect it. A fair of the kind was no novelty to me; but Algy was childishly delighted with all he witnessed, and stood gazing in profound amazement at the stalls of Huka heads, pewter anklets, bangles, and coarse, bright native cloths for turbans and sarees; the money was chiefly copper pice and cowrie shells—the shell currency was a complete revelation to our Londoner, as was a tangle-haired, ash-bedaubed fakir, with his head thrust through a square iron frame, so devised that rest was impossible. He could never lean back, never lie down, never know ease. He had worn this instrument of torture for twelve years, and was a most holy man—so Nuddoo, the shikari, informed us.

“But what is the good of it?” demanded Algy. “What the dickens does he do it for?”

“For a vow,” was the solemn reply.

“I’d rather be dead than have to wear an iron gate round my neck,” rejoined Algy. “But I suppose he thinks he is doing the right thing, and probably he is a good sort.”

And he gave the good sort five rupees.

Next morning we started in real earnest, for the real jungle—each on a separate little cart or chukrun, drawn by a pair of small trotting bullocks; the driver rode on the pole, and behind him there was just room for one person, if he curled himself up, and sat cross-legged. We formed quite a long procession, as we passed down the village street, and all the population came out to speed the sahibs, “who were going to try and shoot the Karwassa man-eater.” Judging by their looks, they were by no means sanguine of our success.

Our road was a mere track, up and down the sides of shallow water-courses, across the dry beds of great rivers, over low hills, and through heavy jungle. The country grew wilder and wilder; here and there we scared a jackal, here and there a herd of deer; villages were very few and far between, and we had passed two that were absolutely deserted: melancholy hamlets, with broken chatties, abandoned ploughs, and grass-grown hearths—now the abode of wild dogs. We were gradually approaching our destination, a cattle country, below a long range of densely wooded hills; having halted at midday to rest our animals for a few hours, we then set out again. But twenty miles is a long distance for a little trotting bullock, especially if his head be turned from home. The eager canter, or brisk trot, had now become a mere spasmodic crawl; for the last mile Algy—the most keen and energetic of the party—had been belabouring and shouting at his pair. What a sight for his club friends, could they have beheld him, the elegant Algy, hoarse, coatless, and breathless! In spite of his desperate exertions, his cattle came to a full stop, and suddenly lay down—an example promptly followed by others. “Darkness was coming,” urged Nuddoo, pointing to the yellow sunset. “We were near an evil country, and it was about his usual time. Karwassa was two koss further, and we had best camp and light fires, and spend the night where we had halted. The sahibs could sleep under the carts, their servants were in waiting, also their food—all would be well.”

I must honestly confess that I thought this a most sensible proposition; but Algy, who had suddenly developed an entirely new character, would not listen to it. During his short sojourn in India, he had picked up a wonderful amount of useful Hindostani words, which he strung together recklessly, and by means of some of them, accompanied by frantic gesticulation, he informed all present that “he was not going to sleep under a cart, but was resolved to spend the night at Karwassa. He would walk there.”

After a short, but stormy, altercation, my cousin carried his point, and set out, accompanied (with great reluctance) by Jones, Nuddoo the shikari, and myself. Algy took command of the party, and got over the ground at an astonishing pace. The yellow light faded and faded, and was succeeded by a grey deathly pallor that rapidly settled down upon the whole face of nature. We marched two and two, along the grass-grown, neglected roads, glancing askance at every bush, at every big tuft of elephant grass (at least, I speak for myself). At last, to my intense relief, the smoke and fires of a village came in view. It proved to be Karwassa—Karwassa strongly entrenched behind its mud walls and a bamboo palisade. After some parley we were admitted by the chowkidar (or watchman), and presently surrounded by the villagers, a poverty-stricken crew, with a depressed, hunted look.

“Once more a party of sahibs come to shoot the man-eaters,” they exclaimed. “Ah, many sahibs had come and come and gone, and naught availed them against the Bagh. He was no Janwar—but an evil spirit.”

“But two days ago,” said the Malgoozar, or head-man—a high-caste Brahmin, with a high-bred face—“he had taken a boy from before his mother’s eyes, as she tilled the patch of vegetables; the screams of the child—he had heard them himself. Ah, ye-yo!”

And he shook his enormous orange turban, and his handsome dignified head, in a truly melancholy fashion. “Moreover, the tiger had taken the woman’s husband—there was not a house in the village that had not lost at least one inmate.”

“Why did they not go away?” I asked.

“Yea—truly, others had abandoned their houses and lands, and fled—but to what avail? The thing was not a Janwar, but a devil.”

A murmur of assent signified that the villagers had accepted their scourge, with the apathetic fatalism of their race. We were presently conducted to an empty hut, provided with broad string beds—and a light. Our Christmas dinner was simple; it consisted of chuppatties and well water, and our spirits were in keeping with our fare; the surrounding misery had infected us. We were even indebted for our present lodgings to the tiger—he had dined upon its former tenant about a month previously. By all accounts he was old, and lame of one hind leg, and had discovered that a human being is a far easier prey than nimble cattle, or fleeting deer. He had studied the habits of his victims, and would stalk the unwary, or the loiterer, like a great cat. Alas! many were the tragedies; with success he had grown bolder, and even broad noonday, and the interior of the village itself, now afforded no protection from his horrible incursions.

The next morning our carts arrived, and we unpacked (the salt, tea, and corkscrew had been forgotten). Afterwards we set out to explore, first the vegetable patches, then the meagre crops, and finally we were shown the dry river bed, the tiger’s high-road to Karwassa. We tracked him easily in the soft, fine, white sand; there were his three huge paws, and a fainter impression of the fourth. Also, there were marks of something dragged, and several dark brown splashes; it was here that he had carried off the wife of one of our present guides, who had looked on,—being powerless to save her.

Needless to say, we were filled with a raging thirst for the blood of this beast—Algy especially. He jawed, he bribed, he gesticulated, he held long conferences with the villagers, with Nuddoo the shikari—an active, leather-skinned man, with a cast in his left eye, who spoke English fluently, and wore a tiger charm. Algy accommodated himself to circumstances with astonishing facility. Most of the night we sat up in a machan, or platform in a tree, over a fat young buffalo, hoping to tempt the man-eater after dark. Subsequently Algy slept soundly on his native charpoy, breakfasted on milk and chuppatties, and sallied forth, gun on shoulder, to tramp miles over the surrounding country. He was indefatigable, and easily wore me out. As I frankly explained, I could not burn the candle at both ends, and sit curled up in a tree till two o’clock in the morning, and then walk down game that self-same afternoon. He never seemed to tire, and he left the champagne and whisky to us, and shot on milk or cold cocoa. His newly acquired Spartan taste declined our imported dainties (tinned and otherwise), and professed to prefer, in deference to our surroundings, a purely vegetable diet.

It was an odd fancy, which I made no effort to combat. Naturally there was more truffled turkey and pâté de foie gras and boar’s head for us! Algy was a successful shot, and reaped the reward of his energy in respectable bags of black buck, hares, sand grouse, chickhira, bustard, peacock—no, though sorely tempted, he refrained from bagging the bird specially sacred to his hosts. Days and nights went by, and so far we were as unsuccessful as our forerunners. In spite of our fat and enticing young buffalo, whom we sometimes sat over from sunset until the pale wintry dawn glimmered along the horizon, we never caught one glimpse of the object of our expedition. Algy was restless, Nuddoo at his wits’ end, whilst Jones had given up the quest as a bad job!

One evening we all gathered round the big fire in the village “chowk” (for the nights were chilly), having a “bukh” with the elders, and, being encompassed by a closely investing audience of the entire population—including, of course, infants in arms—our principal topic was the brute that had so successfully eluded us.

“He will never be caught save by one bait,” remarked a venerable man, wagging his long white beard.

“And what is that, O my father?” I asked.

“A man or a woman,” was the startling reply; “and those we cannot give.”

“Yea, but we can!” cried a shrill voice. There was a sudden movement in the crowd, and a tall female figure broke out of the throng, and pushed her way into the open space and the full light of the fire. She wore the usual dark red petticoat, short-sleeved jacket, and blue cloth or veil over her head. This she suddenly tossed aside, and, as she stood revealed before us, her hair was dishevelled, her black eyes blazed with excitement; but she was magnificently handsome. No flat-faced Gond this, but a Marathi of six-and-twenty years of age—supremely beautiful.

“Protectors of the poor,” she cried, flinging out her two modelled arms, jingling with copper bangles, “here am I. I am willing, and thou shalt give me. The shaitan has slain my man and my son. When the elephant is gone, why keep the goad? This devil of tigers has eaten more than one hundred of our people, and I gladly offer my life in exchange for his. Cattle! no”—with scorn. “He seeks not our flocks; he seeks us! Have we not learned that, above all, he prefers women folk and young? Therefore, behold I give myself”—looking round with a dramatic gesture of her hand—“to save all these.”

“It is Sassi,” muttered the Malgoozar, “the widow of Gitan. Since seven days her mind hath departed. She is mad.”

“Nay, my father, but I am wise! Truly, it is the sahib’s shikari who is foolish, and of but little wit. He knows not the ground. There is the stream close to the forest and the crops. The sahibs shall sit above in the old bher tree, with their guns. They shall tie me up below. Lo, I will sing, yea, loudly, and perchance the tiger will come. He is now seven days without food from our village. Surely he must be an-hungered. I will sing, and bring him to the great lords’ feet—even to his death and mine. Then will my folk be avenged, and my name remembered—Sassi the Marathi, who gave her life for her people!”

She paused, and every eye was fixed upon her as she stood amidst a breathless silence, awaiting our answer, as immovable as a statue.

“Truly, what talk is so foolish as the talk of a woman?” began the Malgoozar, fretfully. “Small mouth, big speech——”

“Nay, my father,” interrupted Nuddoo, eagerly, “but she speaks words of wisdom, and ’tis I that am the fool. The lord sahib returns in two days’ time—and we have done naught.”

As he spoke, his best eye was fixed on Sassi with an expression of ravenous greed not to be described. Apparently he saw the five hundred rupees now within a measurable distance!

“She can lure him, she shall stand on the stack of Bhoosa that pertains to Ruckoo, the chowkidar; she will sing—the nights are still. The Bagh will hear, he will come, and, ere he can approach, the sahibs will shoot him. After all”—with a contemptuous shrug—“it is but a mad woman and a widow.”

“Nuddoo,” shouted Algy, “if I ever hear you air those sentiments again, I’ll shoot you. We don’t want that sort of bait; and, if we did, I would sooner tie you up, than a woman and a widow.”

Nuddoo’s eager protestations, and Algy’s expostulations, were loud and long, and during them a stern-faced old hag placed her hand on Sassi’s shoulder, drew her out of the crowd, and the episode was closed.

Our expedition that night was, as usual, fruitless. We climbed into our tree platform, the now accustomed buffalo dozed in his place undisturbed. Evidently Algy’s mind dwelt on the recent scene at the chowk, and he harangued me from time to time, in an excited whisper, on the subject of Sassi’s heroism, her wonderful beauty, and Nuddoo’s base suggestion. He was still whispering, when I fell asleep. And now it had come to our last day but one. Jones looked upon further effort as supreme folly. He wanted, for once, a night’s unbroken rest, and at six o’clock we left him lying on his string bed, on the flat of his back, smoking cigarettes and reading a two-shilling novel—a novel dealing with smart folk in high life—a book that carried his thoughts far, far from a miserable mud village in the C.P. and its living scourge. How I envied Jones! I would thankfully have excused myself, but Algy was my cousin; he had taken command of the trip, and of me, ever since we had quitted the great trunk road—and I was entirely under his orders.

Nuddoo was not above accepting a hint; this time our machan was lashed into a big pepul tree on the border of the forest, and the edge of a stream that had its home in the hills. We were about two miles from Karwassa as the crow flies, and, as we were rather early, we had ample time to look about us; the scene was a typical landscape in the Central Provinces. To our left lay the hills, covered with dense woodlands, from whose gloomy depths emerged the now shallow river, which trickled gently past us over its bed of dark blue rock and gravel. Beyond the stream, and exactly facing us, lay a vast expanse of grain—jawarri, gram, and vetches—as far as the eye could reach, the monotonous stretch being broken, here and there, by a gigantic and solitary jungle tree. To the right, and on our side of the bank, was an exquisite sylvan glade, a suitable spot to which the forest fairies might issue invitations to the neighbouring elves to “come and dance in the moonbeams.” Between the great trees, the waving crops, and the murmuring brook, I could almost have imagined myself in the midlands of England—save for certain tracks in the sand beneath our tree. Its enormous roots were twisted among rocks and boulders, and, where a spit of gravel ran out into the clear water, were many footprints, which showed where the bear, hyena, tiger, and jackal had come to slake their thirst. I noticed that Nuddoo seemed restless and strange, and that his explanations and answers were incoherent, not to say foolish.

“This looks a likely enough place,” said Algy, with the confidence of a man who had been after tiger for years. “But, I say, Nuddoo, where’s the chap with the buffalo—where is our tie-up?”

“Buffalo never started yet—plenty time—coming by-and-by, at moonrise,” stammered Nuddoo; and, as I climbed into the machan, and he took his place next me, with our rifles, it struck me that Nuddoo was not sober. He smelt powerfully of raw whisky—our whisky—his lips were cracked and dry, and his hand shook visibly. What had he been doing?

“It will be an awful sell if there is no tie-up, and the tiger happens to go by,” said Algy, irritably.

“The gara will be here without fail, your honour’s worship. It will be all right, I swear it by the head of my son. Moreover, we will get the tiger—to-night he touches his last hour.”

There was no question that Nuddoo, for the first time in my experience, was very drunk indeed. Presently the full moon rose up and illuminated the lonely landscape, the haunted jungle, the crops, the glade, and turned the forest stream to molten silver. It was nine o’clock, and, whilst Nuddoo slumbered, Algy and I held our breath, as we watched a noble sambur stag come and drink below us. He was succeeded by an old boar, next came a hyena; it was a popular resort; in short, every animal appeared but the one we wanted—and he was undoubtedly in the neighbourhood, for the deer seemed uneasy.

It was already after ten, and Algy was naturally impatient, and eagerly looking out for our devoted “gara.” He and I were bending forward, listening anxiously; the forest behind us seemed full of stealthy noises, but we strained our ears in vain for the longed-for sound of buffalo hoofs advancing from the front. Nuddoo still slept soundly, and at last Algy, in great exasperation, leant over and shook him roughly.

“Ay,” he muttered, in a sleepy grunt, “it is all right, sahib, the gara will come without fail.”

Even whilst he spoke, we heard, not fifty yards away, the voice of a woman singing in the glade, and Nuddoo now started up erect, and began to tremble violently.

It was light as day, as we beheld Sassi advancing slowly in our direction, singing in a loud clear voice an invocation to Mahadeo the Destroyer!

When she had approached within earshot she halted, and, raising her statuesque face to her namesake the moon, chanted—

“O great lords in the pepul tree, whereto Nuddoo, the drunkard, hath led you,

Behold, according to my promise, lo! I have come.

I sing to my gods, and perchance I will bring the tiger to your honours’ feet.”

For the space of three heart-beats, we remained motionless—paralyzed with horror,—and then Nuddoo, who was gibbering with most mysterious terror, gave me a sudden and an involuntary push.

There, to the left, was something coming rapidly through the crops! The grain parted and waved wildly as it passed; in a moment a huge striped animal, the size of a calf, had crossed the river with a hurried limp.

“Kubberdar! Bagh! Bagh!” roared Algy to the woman. To me, “You’ve got him!”

Undoubtedly it was my shot, but I was excessively flurried—it was new to me to have a human life hanging on my trigger; as he sprang into the open glade I fired—and missed. I heard my cousin draw in his breath hard; I saw the woman turn and face us. The tiger’s spring and Algy’s shot seemed simultaneous; as the echo died away, there was not another sound—the great brute lay dead across the corpse of his victim. I was now shaking as much as Nuddoo; my bad aim had had a frightful result. Before I could scramble down, Algy, with inconceivable rashness, was already beside the bodies, where they lay in the middle of the glade—the monster stretched above his voluntary prey.

The news spread to the village in some miraculous manner. Had the birds of the air carried the great tidings? The entire community were instantly roused by the intelligence. Man, woman, yea, and child, came streaming forth, beating tom-toms and shouting themselves hoarse with joy. They collected about the tiger—who was evidently of far more account than the woman—they kicked him, cursed him, spat on him, and secretly stole his whiskers for a charm against the evil eye. They thrummed the tom-toms madly as they marched round and round Algy—the hero of the hour.

Nuddoo had now entirely forgotten his tremors, he was almost delirious with excitement; the five hundred rupees were his, he could live on them—and on his reputation as the slayer of the great Karwassa man-eater—for the remainder of his existence. He talked till he frothed at the corners of his mouth, he boasted here, he boasted there. He declared that “he had encouraged Sassi, and given her an appointment as the gara, or tie-up. Yea, she had spoken truly—there was no other means!”

Released from his honours and the transports of the tom-toms, these fatal words fell on Algy’s ears, and he went straight for Nuddoo. What he said or did, I know not, but this I know, that from that moment I never saw Nuddoo again until weeks later, when he came to me by stealth in Kori, exceedingly humble and sober, and received, according to Algy’s instructions, “five hundred rupees; but if he asks you for a chit,” wrote Algy, “kick him out of the compound.”

The tiger was big and heavy, he required twenty coolies to carry him back to Karwassa—for his last visit. Sassi was borne on the frame of our machan—ere she was placed there, an old hag covered the beautiful dead face with her veil, and slipped off her sole ornaments, the copper bangles, in a business-like fashion.

“Give me one of those,” said Algy, who was standing by. “I will pay you well. Were you her mother?”

“Her grandmother,” replied the crone. “She was mad. Lo, now she is gone, I shall surely starve!” and she began to whimper for the first time. Truly, she knew this sahib was both rich and open-handed.

Algy and I slept soundly for the remainder of that eventful night; but it is my opinion that the villagers never went to rest at all. The moment we set foot in the street the next morning, a vast crowd surged round my cousin; every one of them carried a string of flowers or—highest compliment—a gilded lime. Women brought their children, from the youngest upwards, and Algy was soon the centre of the village nursery. All these little people were solemnly requested “to look well upon that honoured lord, and to remember when they were old, and to tell it to their children, that their own eyes had rested on the great sahib who had killed the shaitan of Karwassa.”

Algy was loaded with honours and flowers; I must confess that he bore them modestly, and he, on his side, paid high tribute to Sassi the Marathi. He commanded that she should have a splendid funeral. The most costly pyre that was ever seen in those parts was erected, the memory of the oldest inhabitant was vainly racked to recall anything approaching its magnificence. The village resources, and the resources of three other hamlets, were strained to the utmost tension to provide sandal-wood, oil, jewels, and dress. If Algy’s London “pals” could hear of him spending fifty pounds on the burning of a native woman, how they would laugh and chaff him! I hinted as much, and got a distinctly nasty reply. He was quite right; roughing it had a bad effect upon his temper. At sundown the whole population assembled by the river bank to witness the obsequies of Sassi the widow of Gitan; they marvelled much (and so did I) to behold my cousin standing by, bare-headed, during the entire ceremony.

We set out on our return journey that same evening—travelling by moonlight had no dangers now! Algy distributed immense largesse among his friends, viz. the entire community (he also paid all our expenses like a prince). He and the inhabitants of Karwassa parted with many good wishes and mutual reluctance; indeed, a body of them formed a running accompaniment to us for nearly a dozen miles. Our spoil, the tiger’s skin, was a poor specimen. The stripes had a dull, faded appearance; but it measured, without stretching, a good honest ten feet from nose to tip of tail. Once we were out of the jungle, and back in the land of bungalows, daily posts, and baker’s bread, Algy relapsed from a keen and intrepid sportsman into an indolent, drawling dandy. The day after our return to Kori, he took leave of me in these remarkable words—

“Well, good-bye, Perky. You are not a bad sort, though you are not much of a chap to shoot or rough it. However, I have to thank you for taking me off the beaten track, and showing me something which I shall never forget,—and that was entirely out of the common.”

“THE MISSUS.”
A DOG TRAGEDY.

When the Royal British Skirmishers were quartered in Bombay, their second in command was Major Bowen, a spare, grizzled, self-contained little soldier, who lived alone in one of those thatched bungalows that resemble so many monstrous mushrooms, bordering the racecourse. “The Major,” as he was called par excellence, was best described by negatives. He was not married. He was not a ladies’ man. Nor was he a sportsman; nor handsome, young, rich, nor even clever—in short, he was not remarkable for anything except, perhaps, his dog. No one could dispute the fact that Major Bowen was the owner of an uncommon animal. He and this dog had exchanged into “the Skirmishers” from another regiment six years previously, and though the pair were at first but coldly received, they adapted themselves so admirably to their new surroundings that ere long they had gained the esteem and goodwill of both rank and file; and, as time wore on, there actually arose an ill-concealed jealousy of their old corps, and a disposition to ignore the fact that they had not always been part and parcel of the gallant Skirmishers. Although poor, and having but little besides his pay, the Major was liberal—both just and generous; and if he was mean or close-fisted with any one, that person’s name was Reginald Bowen. He had an extremely lofty standard of honour and of the value of his lightest word. He gave a good tone to the mess, and though he was strict with the youngsters, they all liked him. Inflexible as he could look on parade or in the orderly-room, elsewhere he received half the confidences of the regiment; and many a subaltern had been extricated from a scrape, thanks to the little Major’s assistance—monetary and otherwise. He was a smart officer and a capital horseman, and here was another source of his popularity. He lent his horses and ponies, with ungrudging good faith, to those impecunious youths who boasted but the one hard-worked barrack “tat;” and many a happy hour with hounds, or on the polo-ground, was spent on the back of the Major’s cattle. Major Bowen did not race or hunt, and rarely played polo; in fact, he was not much interested in anything—although upwards of forty, he was supremely indifferent to his dinner!—the one thing he really cared about was his dog: a sharp, well-bred fox-terrier, with bright eyes and lemon-coloured ears,—who, in spite of the fact that her original name was “Minnie,” had been known as “the Missus” for the last five years. This name was given to her in joke, and in acknowledgment of her accomplishments; the agreeable manner in which she did the honours of her master’s bungalow, and the extraordinary care she took of him, and all his property. It was truly absurd to see this little creature—of at most sixteen pounds’ weight—gravely lying, with crossed paws, in front of the Major’s sixteen hands “waler,” whilst he was going round barracks, or occupied in the orderly-room. Her pose of self-importance distinctly said, “The horse and syce are in my charge!”

She went about the compound early every morning, and rigorously turned out vagrants, suspicious-looking visitors to the servants’ quarters, and all dogs and goats! She accompanied her master to mess, and fetched him home, no matter how late the hour—and through the rains (and they are no joke in Bombay) it was just the same; there was the chokedar, with his mackintosh and lantern; and there was also, invariably, the shivering, sleepy little Missus. It was of no avail to tie her up at home; not only were her heartrending howls audible for a quarter of a mile, but on one occasion she actually arrived under the dinner-table, chain and all, to the discomfort of the Colonel’s legs, the great scandal of the mess-sergeant, and her own everlasting disgrace! So she was eventually suffered—like wilful woman—to have her way. Her master’s friends were her friends, and took the Missus quite seriously—but she drew the line at dogs. It must be admitted that her manners to her own species were—not nice. She had an unladylike habit of suddenly sitting down when she descried one afar off, and sniffing the, so to speak, tainted air, that was nothing more nor less than a deliberate insult to any animal with the commonest self-respect; many a battle was fought, many a bite was given and received. The Missus was undeniably accomplished; she fetched papers and slippers, gave the paw, and in the new style—on a level with her head, walked briskly on her hind legs, could strum on the piano, and sing, accompanying herself to a clear, somewhat shrill, soprano. There was a little old pianette in the Major’s sitting-room, on which she performed amid great applause. It was not true that the instrument had been purchased solely for her use, or that she practised industriously for two hours a day. No—the pianette had been handed over to her master by a young man (who had subsequently gone to the dogs) as the only available payment of a sum the Major had advanced for him. Battered old tin kettle as it was, that despised piano had cost one hundred pounds! But no one dreamt of this when they laughed at its shortcomings. The Missus was passionately fond of music, and escorted her owner to the band; but she escorted him almost everywhere—to the club, round the barracks, the racecourse, to church—here she was ignominiously secured in the syce’s “cupra,” as she had a way of stealthily peeping in at the various open doors, and endeavouring to focus her idol, which manœuvre—joined with her occasional assistance in the chanting—proved a little trying to the gravity of the congregation. Of course she went to the hills—where she had an immense acquaintance; she had also been on active service on the Black Mountain, and when one night a prowling Afridi crept on his hands and knees into the Major’s tent, he found himself unexpectedly pinned by a set of sharp teeth,—he carried the mark of that bite to his grave.

Major Bowen was not the least ashamed of his affection for his dog. She was his weak point—even the very Company’s dhobies approached him through her favour. He was president of the mess, and in an excellent manner had officiated for years in that difficult and thankless office; a good man of business—prompt, clear-headed, methodical, and conscientious. No scamping of accounts, no peculations overlooked, a martinet to the servants, and possibly less loved than feared. But this is a digression from the Missus. Her master was foolishly proud of her good looks—very sensitive respecting her little foibles (which he clumsily endeavoured to conceal), and actually touchy about her age!

When the Missus had her first, and only, family, it was quite a great local event. The Major’s establishment was turned completely upside down; there was racing and chasing to procure two milch goats for the use of the infants and their mother, and a most elegant wadded basket was provided as a cradle. But, alas! the Missus proved a most indifferent parent. She deserted her little encumbrances at the end of one day, and followed her master to the Gymkana ground. He was heartily ashamed of her, and positively used to remain indoors for the sake of keeping up appearances. He could not go to the club, and have the Missus waiting conspicuously outside with the pony, when all the world knew that she had no business to be there, but had four young and helpless belongings squealing for her at home! She accorded them but little of her company, and appeared to think that her nursery cares were entirely the affair of the two milch goats! One of her neglected children pined, and dwindled, and eventually died, was placed in a cigar-box, and buried in a neat little grave under a rose-bush in the compound, whilst its unnatural mamma looked on from afar off, a totally uninterested spectator! The three survivors were handsome puppies, and the Major exhibited them with pride to numerous callers, and finally bestowed them among his friends (entirely to please their mother, whom they bored to death). They were gratefully accepted, not merely on their own merits, but also as being a public testimonial of their donor’s high opinion and esteem.

It was towards the end of the monsoon, when the compound was almost afloat, and querulous frogs croaked in every corner of the verandahs, that Major Bowen became seriously ill with low malarious fever. He had been out ten years—“five years too long,” the doctor declared; “he must go home at once, and never return to India.” This was bad news for the regiment, and still worse for the invalid, who helped a widowed sister with all he could spare from his colonial allowances. There would not be much margin on English pay!

He was dangerously ill in that lofty, bare, whitewashed bedroom in Infantry Lines. He would not be the first to die there. No,—not by many. His friends were devoted and anxious. The Missus was devoted and distracted. She lay all day long at the foot of his cot, watching and listening, and following his slightest movement with a pair of agonized eyes.

At length there was a change—and for the better. The patient was promoted into a cane lounge in the sitting-room, to solids, and to society—as represented by half the regiment. He looked round his meagrely furnished little room with interested eyes. There was not a speck of dust to be seen, everything was in its place, to the letter-weight on the writing-table, and the old faded photos in their shabby leather frames. Missus’s basket was pushed into a far corner. She had not used it for weeks. He and Missus were going home, and would soon say good-bye for ever to the steep-roofed thatched bungalow, the creaking cane chairs, the red saloo purdahs, to the verandahs, embowered in pale lilac “railway” creeper, to the neat little garden—to the regiment—to Bombay. Their passages were taken. They were off in the Arcadia in three days.

That afternoon, the Major had all his kit and personal property paraded in his sitting-room, in order that the packing of his belongings (he was a very tidy man) should take place under his own eyes. The bearer was in attendance, and with him his slave and scapegoat—the chokra.

The bearer was a stolid, impassive-looking Mahomedan, with a square black beard, and a somewhat sullen eye.

“Abdul,” said his master, as his gaze travelled languidly from one neatly folded pile of clothes to another—from guns in cases to guns not in cases, to clocks, revolvers, watches, candlesticks—the collection of ten years, parting gifts, bargains, and legacies—“you have been my servant for six years, and have served me well. I have twice raised your wages, and you have made a very good thing out of me, I believe, and can, no doubt, retire and set up a ticca gharry, or a shop. I am going away, and never coming back, and I want to give you something of mine as a remembrance—something to remember me by, you understand?”

The bearer deliberately unfolded his arms, and salaamed in silence.

“You may choose anything you like out of this room,” continued the Major, with unexampled recklessness.

Abdul’s eyes glittered curiously—it was as if a torch had suddenly illumined two inky-black pools.

“Sahib never making joke—sahib making really earnest?”—casting on him a glance of almost desperate eagerness. The glance was lost on his master, whose attention was fixed on a discarded gold-laced tunic and mess-jacket.

“Of course,” he said to himself, “Abdul will choose them,” for gold lace is ever dear to a native heart, it sells so well in the bazaar, and melts down to such advantage.

“Making earnest!” repeated the invalid, irritably. “Do I ever do otherwise? Look sharp, and take your choice.”

“Salaam, sahib,” he answered, and turned quickly to where the Missus was coiled up in a chair. “I take my choice of anything in this room. Then I take—the—dog.”

“The—dog!” repeated her owner, with a half-stupefied air.

“Verily, I am fond of Missy. Missy fond of master. The dog and I will remember the sahib together, when he is far away.”

The sahib felt as if some one had suddenly plunged a knife in his heart. In Abdul’s bold gaze, in Abdul’s petition, he, too late, recalled the solemn (but despised) warning of a brother-officer:

“That bearer of yours is a vindictive brute; you got his son turned out of the mess, and serve him right, for a drunken, thieving hound! But sleek as he looks, Abdul will have it in for you yet;” and this was accomplished, when he said, “The dog and I, sahib, will remember you together.”

Major Bowen was still desperately weak, and he had just been dealt a crushing blow; but the spirit that holds India was present in that puny, wasted frame, and, with a superhuman effort, he boldly confronted the two natives—the open-mouthed, gaping chokra, the respectfully exultant bearer—and said, “Atcha” (that is to say, “good”), “it is well;” and then he feebly waved to the pair to depart from him, for he was tired.

Truly it was anything but “good.” It seemed the worst calamity that could have befallen him. He was alone, and face to face with a terrible situation. He must either forfeit his word, or his dog,—which was it to be?

In all his life, to the best of his knowledge, he had never broken his faith, and now to do it to a native!—that was absolutely out of the question. But his dog—his friend—his companion—with whom he never meant to part, as long as she lived (for she had given her to him). He sat erect, and looked over at the Missus, where she lay curled up; her expressive eyes met his eagerly.

Little, O Missus, do you guess the fatal promise that has just been made, nor how largely it concerns you. Her master lay back with a groan, and turned his face away from the light, a truly miserable man! His faithful Missus!—to have to part with her to one of the regiment would have been grief enough; but to a Mahomedan, with their unconcealed scorn of dogs! He must have been mad when he made that rash offer; but then, in justification, his common sense urged, “How was he to suppose that Abdul would choose anything but a silver watch, a gun, or the worth of fifty rupees?” Major Bowen was far from being an imaginative man, but as he lay awake all night long, and listened to the wild roof-cats stealing down the thatch, and heard them pattering back at dawn, one mental picture stood out as distinctly as if he was looking at it with his bodily sight, and it was actually before him.

A low, squalid mud hut in a bazaar; a native string bed, and tied to it by a cord—the Missus. “The Missus,” with thin ribs, a staring coat, and misery depicted on her little face, the sport of the children and the flies—starved, forlorn, heartbroken—dumbly wondering what had happened to her master, and why he had so cruelly deserted her! Oh, when was he coming to fetch her? Not knowing, she was at least spared this—that he would never come.

What an insane promise! As he recalled it, he clenched his hands in intolerable agony. Why did he not offer his watch—his rifle? he would give Abdul a thousand rupees, gladly, to redeem the dog, but his inner consciousness assured him that Abdul, thanks to him, was already well-to-do, and that his revenge was worth more to him than money. This would not be the case with most natives, but he knew, to his cost, that Abdul’s was a stern, tenacious, relentless nature. At one moment, he had decided to poison the Missus with his own hands—prussic acid was speedy; at another, he had resolved to remain in India, doctors or no doctors.

“And sacrifice your life?” again breathed common sense. “Die for a dog!” True, but the dog was not a dog to him. She was his comrade, his sympathizer, his friend. Meanwhile, the object of all these mental wrestlings and agonies slept the sleep of the just, innocent, and ignorant; but in any case, it is a question if a dog’s anxieties ever keep it awake. Her master never closed his eyes; he saw the dawn glimmer through the bamboo chicks; he saw Abdul, the avenger, appear with his early tea, and Abdul found him in high fever; perhaps Abdul was not greatly surprised!

Friends and brother-officers flocked in that day, and sat with the Major, and they noted with concern that he looked worse than he had done at any period of his illness. His naturally pinched face was worn and haggard to a startling degree. Moreover, in spite of the news of the high prices his horses had fetched, he was terribly “down,” and why? A man going home, after ten years of India, is generally intolerably cheerful. They did their best to enliven him, these good-hearted comrades, and—unfailing topic of interest—they discoursed volubly and incessantly of the Missus.

“She is looking uncommonly fit,” said young Stradbrooke, the owner of one of her neglected children. “She knows she is going to England. She was quite grand with me just now! She hates boating like the devil! I wonder how she will stand fourteen days at sea?”

There was a perceptible silence after this question, and then the Major said in a queer voice—

“She is—not—going.”

“Not going?” An incredulous pause, and then some one exclaimed: “Come, Major, you know you would just as soon leave your head behind.”

“All the same—I am leaving her——”

“And which of us is to have her?” cried the Adjutant. “Take notice, all, that I speak first. You won’t pass over me, sir. Missus and I were always very chummy, and I want her to look after my chargers and servants, fetch my slippers, bring me home from mess—and to take care of me and keep me straight.”

“I have already given her away to——” the rest of the sentence seemed to stick in the Major’s throat, and his face worked painfully.

“Away to whom?” repeated young Stradbrooke. “Say it’s to me, sir. I’ve one of the family already—and Missus likes me. I know her pet biscuits, and there are heaps of rats in my stables—such whoppers!”

“Given her—to the bearer—Abdul,” he answered, stoutly enough, though there was still a little nervous quivering of the lower lip.

If the ceiling had parted asunder and straightway tumbled down on their heads, the Major’s audience would not have been half so much dumfoundered. For a whole minute they sat agape, and then one burst out—

“I say, Major, it’s a joke—you would not give her out of the regiment; she is on the strength.”

“She is promised,” replied the Major, in a sort of husky whisper.

Every one knew that the Major’s promises were a serious matter, and after this answer there ensued a long dismayed silence. The visitors eventually turned the topic, and tried to talk of other matters—the last gazette, the new regimental ribbon, of anything but of what every mind was full, to wit, “the Missus.”

The news respecting her bestowal created quite a sensation that evening at the mess—far more than that occasioned by a newly announced engagement, for there was an element of mystery about this topic. Why had the Missus been given away?

“Bowen must be off his chump,” was the general verdict, “poor old chap, to give the dog to that rascal Abdul, of all people!” (One curious feature in Anglo-Indian life, is the low opinion people generally entertain of their friends’ servants.) “The proper thing was, of course, to buy the dog, and keep her in the regiment; and when the Major came to his right senses, how glad he would be, dear old man!”

The Adjutant waylaid Abdul in the road, and said, curtly—

“Is this true, about the dog?—that your sahib has given her to you?”

Abdul salaamed. How convenient and non-committal is that gesture!

“What will you take for her?”

“I never selling master’s present,” rejoined the bearer, with superb dignity.

“What does a nigger want with a dog?” demanded the officer, scornfully. “Well, then, swop her—that won’t hurt your delicate sense of honour. I’ll get you an old pariah out of the bazaar, and give you fifty rupees to buy him a collar!”

“I have refused to-day one thousand rupees for the Missy,” said Abdul, with increased hauteur.

“You lie, Abdul,” said the officer, sternly; “or else you have been dealing with a stark, staring madman.”

“I telling true, Captain Sahib. I swear by the beard of the Prophet.”

“Who made the offer?”

“Major Bone”—the natives always called him “Major Bone.”

“Great Scott! Poor dear old chap” (to himself): “I had no idea he was so badly touched. It is well he is going home, or it would be a case of four orderlies and a padded room. So much for this beastly country!” Then to Abdul, “Look here; don’t say a word about that offer, and come over to my quarters, and I’ll give you some dibs—the sun has been too much for your sahib—and mind you be kind to the Missus; if not, I’ll come and shoot her, and thrash you within an inch of your life.”

“Gentlemen Sahib never beating servants. Sahib touch me, I summon in police-court, and I bring report to regimental commanding officer. Also, I going my own country, Bareilly, and I never, never selling kind master’s present.”

“I know lots of Sahibs in a pultoon (i.e. regiment) at Bareilly, and I shall get them to look out for you and the dog, Mr. Abdul. You treat ‘kind master’s present’ well, and it will be well with you,—if not, by Jove, you will find that I have got a long arm. I am a man of my word, so keep your mouth shut about the Major. To-night my bearer will give you ten rupees.” And he walked on.

“Bowen must be in a real bad way, when he gives his beloved dog to a native, and next day wants to buy it back for a thousand rupees,” said Captain Young to himself. “I thought he looked queer yesterday, but I never guessed that he was as mad as twenty hatters.”

The hour of the Major’s departure arrived; he had entreated, as a special favour, that no one would come to see him off. This request was looked upon as more of his eccentricity, and not worthy of serious consideration; he would get all right as soon as he was at sea, and the officers who were not on duty hurried down to see the last of their popular comrade. He drove up late, looking like death, his face so withered, drawn, and grey, and got out of a gharry, promptly followed by Abdul, carrying the Missus. The steam-launch lay puffing and snorting at the steps—the other passengers were aboard—there was not a moment to lose. The Major bade each and all a hurried farewell; he took leave of the Missus last. She was still in Abdul’s arms, and believed in her simple dog mind that her master was merely bound for one of those detestable sails up the harbour. As she offered him an eager paw, little did she guess that it was good-bye for ever, or that she was gazing after him for the last time, as he feebly descended the steps and took his place in the tender that was to convey him to the P. and O. steamer.

He watched the crowd of friends wildly waving handkerchiefs; but he watched, above all, with a long, long gaze of inarticulate grief, a dark turbaned figure, that stood conspicuously apart, with a small white object in his arms: watched almost breathlessly, till it faded away into one general blur. The Bengal civilian who sat next to Major Bowen in the tender, stared at him in contemptuous astonishment. He had been twenty-five years in the country (mitigating his exile with as much furlough—sick, privilege, and otherwise—as he could possibly obtain), and this was the first time he had seen a man quit the shores of India—with tears in his eyes!

THE BETRAYAL OF SHERE BAHADUR.

I am merely the wife of a British subaltern, whereas my aunt Jane is the consort of a commissioner. One must go to India, to realize the enormous and unfathomable gulf which yawns between these two positions.

Take, for instance, that important difference—the difference in pay. On the first of each month, Aunt Jane’s lord and master receives several thousand and odd rupees—a heavy load for two staggering peons to carry from the treasury—whereas my husband’s poor little pittance, of two hundred and fifty-six rupees and odd annas, our bearer swings in a lean canvas bag, and in one hand, with an air of jaunty contempt!

At dinner-parties and other grand functions, I see my aunt’s round-shouldered back, and well-known yellow satin, leading the van, with her hand on the host’s arm, whilst I humbly bring up the rear—one of the last joints in the tail of precedence.

Afterwards—after coffee, conversation, and music—not a woman in the room may venture to stir, until my little fat relative has “made the move” and waddled off to her carriage. Mr. Radcliffe, my uncle by marriage, rules over a large district; he is a stout, puffy, imposing-looking man, attended by much pomp and circumstance, and many scarlet-clad chuprassis. His wife rules him—as well as the station; manages every one’s affairs, acts as the censor of public morals, and may be implicitly relied upon to utter the disagreeable things that ought to be said, but that no one but herself is willing to say. The Radcliffes have no family, and therefore she has ample time to indulge her fine powers of observation, organization, and conversation. When I married, and was about to come to India, a year ago, my people remarked on an average once a week—

“If you are going to Luckmee, you will be quite close to your aunt Jane at Rajapore, and only think how delightful that will be for you!” but I was by no means so confident of this supreme future joy. Rajapore is a large mixed military and civil station; Luckmee is on the same line of rail, a run of a couple of hours; a small and insignificant cantonment, which looks up to Rajapore as its metropolis, and does all its shopping there. No, I did not find it at all delightful, being within such easy hail of Aunt Jane. She made unexpected descents—as a rule, early in the morning—driving up from the station in a rickety “ticca gharry,” to spend what she called “a good long day.” First of all, she went over the bungalow precisely as if it was to let furnished, and she was the incoming tenant; then she cross-examined me closely, read my home letters, looked at my bazaar account, sniffed at my new frocks, snubbed my friends, and departed by the last train in the highest spirits, leaving me struggling with the idea that I was still a rather troublesome schoolgirl in short frocks and a pig-tail. Now and then I returned the visit—by command—drove with Aunt Jane in her state barouche, in which she sat supported by a pair of rather faded Berlin wool cushions, great eyesores to my critical English taste, which largely discounted the fine carriage, big bay walers, fat coachman (an Indian Jehu of any pretension must be corpulent), the running syces, and splendid silver-mounted chowries or yâk tails.

I also was present at various heavy tiffins and dinners, in the capacity of deputy assistant hostess and niece. I had come in now, to wait upon Aunt Jane and “take leave,” as she was just off to England, and had imperatively summoned me to report myself ere she started. I found the great square white bungalow externally gay with Bignonia vinusta, internally in the utmost confusion. The hall was littered with straw and bits of newspapers, the drawing-room was full of packing-cases, half the contents of the cellar were paraded on the floor, and dozens of tins of “Europe” stores were also on review, all being for sale. Aunt Jane was seated at a writing-table, revising lists with a rapid pen.

“You discover me,” she exclaimed, offering a plump cheek, “sitting like Marius among the ruins of Carthage.”

I was dumb. I had no idea until now that Marius was a stout little elderly woman, wearing a shapeless grey wide-awake and blue spectacles.

“I feel almost fit for the poggle khana (mad-house),” she continued. “Just look here! Here is my list of furniture, come back from making the round of the station, and all that has been taken is a watering-pot, six finger-glasses, and a pie-dish!” (The truth was that people were tired of my aunt’s lists.) “And here are dozens of servants clamouring for chits—and a man waiting to buy the cows. I wish to goodness some one would buy your uncle’s shikar camel,”—reading aloud from list,—“‘young, strong, easy trot and walk, with saddle, Rs. 200.’ Your uncle is going to chum with Mr. Jones. He does not intend shooting this season—even he finds it an expensive pursuit,” this in a significant parenthesis. “I’ve not put away the ornaments, nor sold off my stores, nor packed one of my own things.”

I muttered some sympathetic remark, but I knew that Aunt Jane enjoyed these “earthquakings” immensely. She was constantly uprooting her establishment, and taking what she called “a run home.”

“And you go on Monday?” I inquired.

“Yes, child; though I don’t believe I shall ever be ready. Your mother, of course, will want to know how you are? I must candidly tell her that you are looking dreadfully pasty. Ah! I see you have got a parcel.”

“Only a very little one,” I pleaded apologetically.

“Well, well, I suppose I must try and take it; and now what are your plans?”

“Tom has got two months’ leave, and Charlie is coming up from Madras; we are going away on a trip into the real jungle.”

“For what?” she asked tartly.

“Well, to see something different from the routine of cantonment life, something different from the band-stand and D.W.P. pattern church—to see real India.”

“What folly! Real India, indeed!” she snorted; “as if you would ever see it! It makes me wild to hear of people talking, and worse still, writing about India, as if one person could grasp even a small corner of it. Here am I, twenty-five years in the country, speaking the language fluently, and what do I know?” she paused dramatically. “The bazaar prices, the names of the local trees and flowers, the rents of the principal houses up at Simla.” (I have reason to believe that my aunt did herself gross injustice; she knew the private affairs of half the civilians in the provinces, and was on intimate terms with their “family skeletons.”) “As to the character of the people! I cannot even fathom my own ayah, and she is with me eleven years.”

“I believe some people know a great deal about India,” I ventured to protest.

“Stuff!” she interrupted. “One person may know a little of one part of the continent, but there are twenty Indias!—all different, with different climates, customs, and people. What resemblance is there between a Moplah on the west coast and a Leucha from Darjeeling, a little stunted Andamanese and a Sikh; a Gond from the C.P. and a Pathan from the frontier; a Bengali Baboo and a bold Rohilla?” (Aunt Jane was now mounted on her hobby, and I had nothing to do but to look and listen.) “Every one thinks his own little corner is India. You, as an officer’s wife—the wife of a subaltern in a marching regiment”—(she always insisted on the prefix “marching”)—“have better chances than a civilian, for they live in one groove; you are shot about from Colombo to Peshawar. However, much good it will do you, for you are naturally dull, and have no talent for observation.”

“No, not like you, Aunt Jane,” I ventured with mild sarcasm: was she not going home?

“And where are you bound for?” she pursued.

“About a hundred miles out, due north.”

“That is the Merween district, I know it well. We were in that division years ago. Had you consulted me, before making your plans, your uncle might have arranged about elephants for you. It’s too late now,” with a somewhat triumphant air.

“But we don’t want elephants,” I protested; “we have our ponies.”

“Id——” correcting herself, “simpleton! I meant for shooting from. The district is full of long grass. Tom will get no deer, nor indeed any game on foot. You may have the shikar camel, if you like, for his keep, and the Oontwallah’s pay—no?” as I shook my head emphatically. “Well, I can give you one tip: take plenty of tinned stores; the villages are scattered, and Brahmin. You won’t get an egg, much less a fowl—at most a little ghee and flour; but I strongly advise you to take your own poultry, and a couple of milch goats, also plenty of quinine and cholera mixture; parts of the country are very marshy and unhealthy. I suppose you have tents? We cannot lend you any.”

“Yes, we have three, thank you.”

“And so your brother Charles is going with you! Tell him that I think he had much better have stayed quietly with his regiment, and worked for the higher standard—a boy only out two years. Of course you are paying his expenses?”

I nodded. Tom was moderately well off; though we were not rich, we were not exactly poor, and I always had a firm conviction that Aunt Jane would have liked me much better if I had been a pauper! As it was, she considered me dangerously independent.

“Of course you think you know your own business best!” removing her spectacles as she spoke, “but mark my words, you will find this trip a great deal more costly than you imagine. With us civilians it is different, a sort of royal progress; but with you—well, well,” shaking her head, “you must buy your own experience!”

A week later we had set forth, Tom, Charlie, and myself. We took Aunt Jane’s advice (it was all she had given us), and despatched our tents and carts twenty-four hours’ ahead, so as to give them a good start. We cantered out after them, a fifteen-mile ride, the following day. It was my first experience of camp life, and perfectly delightful; the tent under the trees felt so cool and fresh, in comparison with a sun-baked bungalow. Our servants, who appeared quite at home, had built a mud fireplace, and were cooking the dinner; the milch goats were browsing, and the poultry picking about in the adaptable manner of an Indian bazaar fowl. Our next halt was to be twenty miles farther on, at an engineer’s bungalow, which was splendidly situated between a forest swarming with game and a river teeming with fish. Here we intended to remain for some time; we should be in the territory of the Rajah of Betwa, and were bearers of a letter asking for his assistance, in the way of procuring provisions in the villages. At midday we halted for several hours in a mango tope, the home of thousands of monkeys, and went forward again about four o’clock. Our road was bordered at either side by a golden sea of gently waving crops, for we were in the heart of a great wheat country. Presently we passed through the town of Betwa, which chiefly consisted of a long dirty bazaar, an ancient fort, and a high mud wall, enclosing the palace of the rajah. About a mile beyond the outskirts, we beheld a cloud of yellow dust rapidly approaching.

“I’ll bet ten to one it’s the rajah,” said Tom, as he abruptly pulled up his pony.

I felt intensely excited. I had never seen a real live rajah in my life; and I held myself in readiness for any amount of pomp and splendour, from milk-white arabs with gold trappings, to a glass coach. But what was this that I beheld, as we drew respectfully to one side? I could scarcely believe my own eyes, as there thundered by a most dilapidated waggonette, drawn by one huge bony horse and a pony, truly sorry steeds; the harness was tied up with rope, and even rags! Seated in front was a spare dark man, with a disagreeable expression, dressed in a stuff coat, the colour of Reckitt’s blue, and a gold skull-cap. He salaamed to us in a condescending manner, and was presumably the rajah. A fat pock-marked driver held the reins; in the body of the waggonette were six men (the suite), and their united weight gave the vehicle a dangerous tilt backwards. The equipage was accompanied by four ragamuffins, with long spears, riding miserable old screws with bell-rope bridles. They kept up a steady tittuping canter, raising a cloud of suffocating dust, in which they presently vanished.

“I can’t believe that that is a rajah, much less our rajah,” I remarked to my companions.

“I can,” said Tom, emphatically. “He looks what he is—an unmitigated scoundrel, and a miser. Did you notice how close his eyes were together? He is a rich man, too; is lord of the soil as far as your eyes can see. His grandfather owned a great deal more before the Mutiny, but it was shorn from him, and he was thankful to be left with an acre—or his life.”

“Why?” asked Charlie and I in a breath.

“He came out of that bad business very badly. When the inhabitants of Luckmee were surprised, they sent their women and children to him for protection, he being, as they supposed, their very good friend; but he simply bundled them all out, and they were every one massacred. The rajah then believed that the mutineers would carry everything before them, but after the fall of Delhi he changed his tune, and sent on a charger the head of the chief leader in these parts—his own nephew, as it happened, but this is a detail—in order to make his peace. Of course, he saved his skin, but he had a bad record, and his grandson is a chip of the old block.”

“Who told you all this?” I inquired.

“The collector. He says this man grinds down the ryots shamelessly, and does many a queer thing that ought to land him in a court of law. Here is the forest, and here, thank goodness, is the bungalow at last.”

Our halting-place proved to be a thatched stone cottage, containing three rooms, and bath-rooms; there was a deep verandah all round, excellent servants’ quarters and stables—in short, it was the beau idéal of a jungle residence. One verandah looked towards the forest, with its cool, dark recesses, the other commanded the river, and beyond it, faintly on the sky line, glimmered the snows.

The bungalow was surrounded by about twenty acres of park-like pasture, through which ran a public road leading to a fine bridge. We took in these details as we lounged about in the moonlight after dinner, and unanimously agreed that our present quarters were quite perfect in every respect.

The next day we fished—a nice, lazy, unexciting occupation. I sauntered home early in the afternoon—not being a particularly enthusiastic angler—and disposed myself in a comfortable deep straw chair in the verandah, in order to enjoy a novel and what I considered a well-earned cup of tea. As I reclined at my ease, devouring fiction and cake, sandwich fashion, my attention was arrested by a sound of loud crashing and smashing of branches in the usually death-like stillness of the forest. I sat erect, gazing intently at the violent storm among the leaves, expecting to see emerge a deer, a pig, or, at the very worst, a peacock! But after staring steadily for some time, I found that I was looking at the back of a remarkably tall elephant.

The ayah, who was also watching, pointed and called out, “Hathi, mem sahib, burra hathi,” as if I did not know an elephant when I saw one!

Presently I descended the steps, strolled across the green, and pushed aside the bushes. There I beheld a lean native, all ribs and turban, busily engaged in baking his chupatties over a fire of sticks—a little wizened man, with a sharp cruel face, and close behind him stood a huge gaunt elephant, or rather the framework of one, for the animal was shockingly thin. Its poor backbone was as sharp as a razor; its skin hung in great wrinkles; its eye—an elephant’s eye is small and ugly—this beast’s eye gave expression to its whole body, and had a woful look of inarticulate misery, of almost desperate, human appeal.

The mahout stood up and salaamed, and forthwith he and I began to converse—that is to say, we made frantic endeavours to understand one another—the ayah, whose curiosity had dragged her forth, now and then throwing in a missing word.

“By my favour, it was the rajah’s state elephant; he had also three others; he sent them into the forest to feed and to rest, when he did not require them. This, Shere Bahadur (brave lion), was the great processional elephant, and had a superb cloth-of-gold canopy that covered him from head to tail.”

(“Poor brute!” I said to myself, “otherwise he would be a terribly distressing spectacle.”)

“Why is he so thin?” I demanded anxiously.

“Because he is old,” was the ready answer, “more than one hundred years. He had been, so folk said, a war-elephant taken in battle. He was worth thousands and thousands of rupees once. He knew no fear, and no fatigue. Moreover, he was a great shikar elephant—many tigers had he faced”—and here the mahout proudly showed me the traces of some ancient scars—“even now the Sahib Log borrowed him as an honour.”

“And what had he to eat?” I inquired.

“More than he could swallow—twelve large chupatties twice a day—this size”—holding his skinny arms wide apart—“also ghoor, and sugar-cane, and spice.”

I looked about. I saw no sign of anything but a few branches of neem tree, and the preparations for the mahout’s own meagre meal.

“Hazoor, he has had his khana—he has dined like a prince,” reiterated the mahout. “Kuda ka Kussum,” that is to say, “so help me God.”

Nevertheless I remained incredulous. I went over to the bungalow and brought out a loaf, to the extreme consternation of our khansamah—we being forty miles from the nearest bazaar bakery—this I broke in two pieces, and presented it to Shere Bahadur, who seized it ravenously. Of course it was a mere crumb, and the wrinkled eager trunk was piteously held out for more; but more I dared not give, for I was in these days entirely under the yoke of my domestics! I related my little adventure during dinner—small episodes become great ones in the jungle, where we had no news, no dâk. Afterwards we took our usual stroll in the moonlight, and Charlie and I went to visit my new acquaintance. He was alone. The mahout was away, probably smoking at a panchayet in the nearest village. In a short time we were joined by Tom, who, as he came up, exclaimed—

“By Jove, he is thin! I’ve just been hearing all about the beast from the shikarri; he knows him well. He was a magnificent fellow in his day. The rajah has not the heart to feed him in his old age, and turns him out to pick up a living, or starve—whichever he likes. He is not going to pay for his keep, and so the poor brute is dying by inches. Every now and then, when there is a ‘tamasha,’ he is sent for—for a rajah without elephants is like a society woman without diamonds.”

“And the twelve chupatties, and spices, and sugar?” I exclaimed.

“All moonshine!” was the laconic reply.

I thought a great deal of that miserable famishing animal. He preyed on my mind, in the watches of the night: I could hear him through the open window, moving restlessly among the bushes. I was sorely tempted to rise and steal my own loaves, and give him every crumb in the larder!

Next morning I boldly commanded four enormous cakes to be made, and took them to him myself. He seemed to know me, and swallowed them down with wolfish avidity.

When we were fishing that same evening I noticed the elephant down in the shallows of the river, standing knee-deep in the rushes; his figure, in profile against the orange sunset, looked exactly like the arch of a bridge, so wasted was he.

In the course of a day or two we had firmly cemented our acquaintance. Shere Bahadur came up to the verandah for sugar-cane and bread, and salaamed to me ostentatiously whenever we met.

“As we are feeding the beast, we may as well make use of him,” remarked Tom, one morning. “The mahout declares that the rajah will let us have him for his keep, and his own wages—six rupees a month. We can have a howdah, and the elephant will be very useful when we get among the long grass and the deer.”

“Yes, do let us have him,” I gladly agreed. I could not endure to leave him behind, to return to his ration of neem leaves and semi-starvation. Tom therefore despatched a “chit” by the mahout to the rajah, and the next day Shere Bahadur came shuffling back, carrying a howdah and his owner’s sanction, also a paper which Tom was requested to sign.

This document (written on the leaf of a copy-book, in English, with immense flourishes) set forth—“That Tom would guarantee to hand Shere Bahadur back, in good condition, at the end of two months, and that if anything happened to the elephant, short of natural death, Tom was responsible for the value of the animal, and the sum of two thousand rupees.”

“Well,” said Tom, “it is fair enough, though I doubt if the poor old bag of bones is worth two hundred rupees. He will be well fed, and returned in good case, and if he dies now on our hands, after living a century, it will be a base piece of ingratitude for all your kindness; however, there is life in the old boy yet. You and he are great chums. He is a splendid shikar elephant, though a bit slow. I think it is a capital bunderbast.” And he signed.

The mahout (now our servant) was full of zeal and zest, and came and laid his head on my feet, and assured me that “I was his father and his mother, and that he was my slave.”

I took care to see Shere Bahadur fed daily. He now really received a dozen thick chupatties, and plenty of sugar-cane and ghoor, and his expression lost its look of anguish and famine, though it was early days to expect any improvement in his figure. When we marched, he accompanied us, and I rode in the howdah and enjoyed it. He picked his way so cleverly, and thrust branches aside from our path so carefully, and seemed (though this may be a wild flight of imagination) to like to work for me. He was capital at going through jungle, or over rough ground, but in marshy places the poor dear old gentleman seemed to have great difficulty in getting along, and to have but little power in his hind quarters.

Six weeks of our leave had melted away, as it were—time had passed but too rapidly. Shere Bahadur proved invaluable out shooting. Thanks to him, Tom had got a fine tigress, and Charlie some splendid head of deer. They looked so odd in the high elephant grass—no elephant to be seen, but merely two men, as it were sailing along in a howdah. Our last days were, alas! drawing near; our stores were becoming perilously low. It was the end of March, the grass and leaves were dry as tinder and brittle as glass, as the hot winds swept over them. Yes, it was imperative to exchange these charming tents for the thick cat-haunted thatch of our commonplace bungalow. We were all sunburnt, happy, and somewhat shabby. I had contrived to see something of India, after all. I knew the habits of some of the birds and beasts—the names of flowers and trees. I had gazed at my own reflection in lonely forest pools, that were half covered with water-lilies, and from whose sedgy margin flocks of bright-plumaged water-fowl had flashed.

I had met the peacock and his wives leisurely sauntering home after a night of pillage in the grain fields. I had seen, in a sunny glade, a wild dog playing with her puppies. I had watched the big rohu turning lazily over in the river; the sly grey alligator lying log-like on the bank; the blue-bull, or nilgai, dashing through the undergrowth. In short, I had seen a good deal, though I was dull.

Twice a day I visited my dear friend Shere Bahadur. I had become quite attached to him, and I firmly believe that he loved me devotedly. One evening I arrived rather earlier than usual on my rounds, and discovered the mahout in deep converse with another man, a stranger, who brought his visit to an abrupt close, and said, as he hurried away, “Teen Roze” (i.e. “three days”), to which the mahout responded, “Bahout Atcha” (i.e. “good”).

“It is my Bhai,” he explained. Every one seems to be every one else’s brother, especially suspicious-looking acquaintances. “He has come a long journey with a message from my father—my father plenty sick, calling for me.” An every-day excuse for “taking leave,” only second to the death of the delinquent’s grandmother.

On the afternoon of the third day we found it too hot to go out early, and were sitting in our dining-room tent fanning ourselves vigorously and playing “spoof,” when we suddenly heard a great commotion—a sound of shouting and running and trumpeting. A tiger, or a “must” elephant, was my first idea. Yes, there it was! A cry of “The elephant! the elephant!” It was an elephant—my elephant. We hurried to where a crowd of all our retainers had collected. A quarter of a mile away there was a sudden dip in the ground, a half-dried-up pool of water, covered with a glaze of dark blue scum, surrounded by an expanse of black oozy mud, fringed with rushes and great water-reeds,—the sort of place that was the sure haunt of malarious fever—and struggling in the midst of the quagmire was Shere Bahadur. He had already sunk up to his shoulders, whilst his mahout lay on the bank tearing his hair, beating his head upon the ground, and shrieking at intervals, “My life is departing! my life is departing!” Tom angrily ordered him to arise, and get to his place on the animal’s back, and endeavour to guide him out at the safest part; but it appeared to be all quagmire, and quivered for yards at every movement of the elephant. The mahout gibbered, and sobbed, but complied. He scrambled on to Shere Bahadur’s neck, and yelled, gesticulated, urged, and goaded. No need; the poor brute was aware of the danger—he was labouring now, not for other people’s profit or pleasure, but for his own life. Every one ran for wood, wine-cases, or branches, and flung them to the elephant; and it was pitiful to see how eagerly he snatched at them, and placed them beneath him, and endeavoured to build himself a foothold. After long and truly desperate exertions, he got his forelegs right up on the sound ground, ropes were thrown to him, but, alas! it was all of no avail; the morass was a peculiarly bad one, and his powerless hind quarters were unable to complete the effort and land him safely. No, the cruel quagmire slowly, surely, and remorselessly sucked him down; and, after a most determined effort on the part of the spectators, and a frenzied but impotent struggle on his own, Tom turned to me and exclaimed—

“Poor old boy! it’s not a bit of good; he will have to go!”

“Go where?” I cried. “He can be saved; he must be saved,” I added, hysterically.

“Impossible; he has not sufficient power to raise himself; the ground is a sort of quicksand. If there was another elephant here, we might manage to haul him out; but, as it is, it is a mere question of time—he will be gone in half an hour.”

I wept, implored, ran about like one demented, begging, bribing, entreating the natives to help. And, I must confess, they all did their very best, nobly led by Tom and Charlie. But their efforts were fruitless. Shere Bahadur’s hour had come. He had escaped bullets, grape-shot, and tiger, to be gradually swallowed down by that slimy black quagmire, and—horrible thought—buried alive! At the end of a quarter of an hour he had sunk up to his ears, and had ceased to struggle. His trunk was still above the mud. His poor hidden sides!—we could hear them going like the paddle-wheels of a steamer. It appeared to me that his eye sought mine!

Oh, I could endure the scene no longer. I left the crowd to see the very end, rushed back to the tent, flung myself on my bed, covered up my head, and wept myself nearly blind. It seemed hours and hours—twenty-four hours—before Tom came in, and said, as solemnly as if he were announcing the death of a friend, “It is all over.”

The detestable mahout over-acted his part; at first he simulated frenzy, his grief far surpassed mine, he gibbered, wept, and beat his breast, and rolled upon the ground at our feet in a paroxysm of anguish, as he assured us that the rajah was a ruthless lord, and that when he returned to Betwa without the Hathi he would certainly be put to torture, and subsequently to death. And then Tom suddenly bethought himself of the terms of the agreement. The elephant had not died a natural death. No, he had “gone down quick into the pit.” He was dead, and Tom was bound to pay two thousand rupees (about £150). He looked exceedingly glum, but there was no other alternative; yes, he must pay—even if he could not contrive to look pleasant. He most reluctantly sent the rajah a cheque for the amount on the Bank of Bengal, and the mahout departed with somewhat suspicious alacrity, leaving the howdah behind him.

Afterwards, we became acquainted with two extraordinary facts. One was that the rajah had carefully arranged for the death of the elephant, even before we left our first camp; that the mahout’s so-called brother was simply a special messenger, who had been despatched to “hurry up” the tragedy. Discovery the second, that the mahout had been seen by our shikarri and several other men deliberately goading and urging the elephant into the quagmire. The wise animal had at first steadily resisted, but putting implicit faith in his rider—who had driven him for years—and being the most docile of his race, he had ultimately yielded, and obediently waded in to his death. At first we indignantly refused to credit these stories, and declared that they were merely the ordinary malicious native slander; but subsequently a slip of copy-book paper was discovered in the pocket of the howdah, which, being interpreted by Tom, read as follows—

“Make no delay. Bad quagmire. Give fifty rupees.—Betwa.”

And Shere Bahadur was betrayed for that sum.

We received in due time an effusive letter from the Rajah of Betwa, written, as usual, on the leaf of a copy-book, and inscribed with numerous ornamental flourishes. He also enclosed a formal stamped receipt, which is on my bill-file at the present moment, and is not the least remarkable of the many curious documents there impaled. It says—

“Received from Mister Captain Thomas Hay, the sum of two thousand government rupees, the value of one War elephant—lost!”

“PROVEN OR NOT PROVEN?”
THE TRUE STORY OF NAIM SING, RAJPOOT.

Look around, and above, with your mind’s eye, and behold high hills and deep narrow valleys—valleys overflowing with corn, and hills speckled with flocks; no, these are not the Alps,—nor yet the Andes; the sturdy brown people have the Tartar type of face, their stubborn, shaggy ponies are of Thibetan breed. You stand on the borders of Nepaul, and among the lower slopes of the great Himalayas—a remote district, but tolerably populated and prosperous. There are many snug, flat-roofed houses scattered up and down the niches in these staircase-like heights, encompassed with cowsheds, melon gardens, groves of walnut trees, and a few almost perpendicular acres of murga (grain); their proprietors are well-to-do, their wants inconsiderable, the possession of a pony, half a dozen goats, and a couple of milch buffaloes, constitutes a man of means, who is as happy in his way as, perhaps happier than, the English or Irish owner of a great landed estate. Moreover, this pastoral life has its pleasures: there are holy festivals, fairs, feasts, wrestling-matches,—and occasionally a little gambling and cock-fighting. But even in these primitive mountain regions, life is not all Arcadian simplicity; there are black spots on the sun of its existence, such as envy, hatred, malice, jealousy, false-witness, and murder.

Peaceful, even to sleepiness, as the district appears, serene and immovable as the grand outline of its lofty white horizon, nevertheless this remote corner of the world has been the scene of a renowned trial—a trial which outrivalled many a notorious case in far-away Europe for exciting violent disputes, disturbances, and bloodshed—a trial which convulsed Kumaon, Kali Kumaon, and Gurwalh—whose effects, as it were the ripples from a stone cast into still waters, are experienced to the present hour in the shape of curses, collisions, and feuds. At the root of the trouble was, as usual, a woman.

Durali (which signifies ‘darling’) was the grandchild and only surviving relative of Ahmed Dutt, a thriftless, shrivelled old hill-man, who smoked serrus (or Indian hemp) until he brought himself into a condition of imbecility, and suffered his worldly affairs to go to ruin; his hungry cattle and goats strayed over his neighbours’ lands, he cared not for crops, nor yet for wor-hos (boundary marks), he cared for nought but his huka, and his warm padded quilt, and abandoned the beautiful Durali, like the cattle, to her own devices. Now, according to Durali, these devices were supremely innocent: she spun wool, kept fowl, laboured somewhat fitfully in the fields, and tended the jungle of dahlias and marigolds which threatened to swallow up the little slab-roofed dwelling—that was all. So said Ahmed Dutt’s granddaughter, but public opinion held a different view; it lifted up its voice (in a shrill treble), and declared that Durali, being by general consent the most beautiful woman in Kumaon, had wrung the hearts of half the young—ay, and old—men in the province; that of a truth her suitors were legion; but that she turned her back on all of them—as she would have fools to believe—no!

Her grandfather was indigent, as who could deny? Whence, then, the rich silver necklet, the bangles, the great belt of uncut turquoise, blue as the spring sky—whence the strong Bhootia pony? Had Ahmed Dutt been otherwise than a smoke-sodden idiot and a dotard, he had, according to custom, sold this valuable chattel a full year ago, and received as her price three hundred rupees, yea, and young asses, perchance, and buffaloes. As it was, Durali ruled him tyrannically, flouted all humble pretenders for her hand, and at eighteen years of age was her own mistress, fancy-free, poor, ambitious, and beautiful—miraculously beautiful! since her wondrous loveliness stirred even the leathern hearts of these hill-men; and she possessed a face, figure, craft, and coquetry, amply warranted to set the whole of Kumaon in a blaze. Yea, the saying that “to be her friend was unfortunate, to be her suitor beckoned death,” deterred but few. It was undeniable that Farid Khan had fallen over the khud, on the bad road to Pura; do not his bones lie, to this day, unburied and bleaching, at the foot of that awful precipice? Who said that his rival, Jye Bhan, had pushed him in the dark? Who could prove it? At any rate, he was no more. As was also Kalio Thapa, carried away by a mighty flood in the Sardah river—how it befell, who could say? And there was, moreover, Phulia, who had certainly hanged himself because Durali had spurned him.

Many were her adorers, and exceedingly bitter the hatred they bore to one another.

Durali was tall, erect, and Juno-like, with a skin like new wheat, features of a bold Greek type, abundant jet-black hair, and a pair of magnificent eyes. Other women declared that there was magic in these—certainly they spoke with tongues, they commanded, exhorted, entreated, dazzled, and bewitched.

But Durali owed nothing to the fine feathers which enhance the attractions of so many fine birds. She wore a dark-blue petticoat and short cotton jacket, a few bangles and a copper charm—the ordinary attire of an ordinary Pahari girl; dress could add but little to her superb personality.

The handsome granddaughter of Ahmed Dutt was well known by reputation in the surrounding villages, her name was in every one’s mouth, her fame had penetrated even as far as Almora itself. At the sacred feast of the Dusserah, where crowds assemble to behold the yearly sacrifice, there Durali appeared for the first time, and in gala costume, wearing a short-sleeved red velveteen bodice, an enviable silver necklet, and a flower behind each ear. The eyes of half the multitude were riveted on the hill beauty—instead of the devoted buffalo, which had been tied up for days, at the quarter guard of the Ghoorkas, and now innocently awaited its impending fate.

Yes, people actually thronged, and pressed, and pushed, and strove, in order to obtain a good look at the famous Durali, for whom men had contended, and fought—ay, and died.