It was a stirring scene that greeted the three sahibs on their arrival
at the conflict. Like a family of monkeys the natives decorated the
tree, while below was Burra Moti giving lusty battle to the tusker.
Either out of chivalry or cowardice, Raj Bahadar was backing up,
refusing to obey the prod of his mahout's goad, and charge.
As Moti came at the bull like a battering-ram he received her on his
forehead, the impact sounding like the crash of two meeting freight
cars, and she, vindictively cunning, with a quick twist of her head,
gashed him in the neck with a long tusk.
"Come down out of there, you women of the sweeper caste!" Finnerty
commanded. The natives dropped to the ground. One of them, uncoiling his
rawhide rope, darted in behind Moti, noosed a lifted foot, and ran back
with the trailing end.
Raj Bahadar, discouraged by the thrust in his neck, wheeled and fled,
pursued by Moti, the native lassooer, clinging to the trailing noose,
being whipped about like a wind-tossed leaf. With a shout Finnerty
followed, the others joining in the chase.
A thick growth of timber checked Raj Bahadar, and, as Moti slackened her
pace, the man with the rawhide darted around a tree with the rope;
Finnerty and the others grasped the end, the rawhide creaked and
stretched, and as Moti plunged forward her hind leg was suddenly yanked
into the air, bringing her down. Another man sprang in to noose a
foreleg, but Moti was too quick for him; she was up to stand for a
little sullen meditation.
The native flashed in and out, almost within reach of her trunk, trying
to make her raise a forefoot that he might noose it and slip his rawhide
about a tree, when Moti, tethered fore and aft, would be helpless.
"Be careful!" Finnerty called as the noose man slipped in and flicked
Moti on the knee with no result but the curling up of her trunk, as if
out of harm's way. Again he danced in, and as the long trunk shot out
like a snake darting from a coil he sprang beneath the big head, giving
a laugh of derision; but Moti struck sidewise with a forefoot, and with
a sickening crunch the man dropped ten feet away.
Uttering a squeal of rage, the elephant whipped about and charged back,
the rawhide noose breaking like a piece of twine. Finnerty was fair in
her path, but with a grunt, as if to say, "Get out of the way, friend,"
she brushed by him, and would have gone straight off to the jungle had
not a man, in a sudden folly of fright, darted from behind a tree only
to stumble and fall before he had taken a dozen steps. Down on her knees
went Moti, seeking to spear the fallen man with her tusks, but at the
first thrust one went either side of his body, and, being long, the
great, crushing head did not quite reach him. Grasping both pillars of
this ivory archway, the man wriggled out and escaped as Moti, pulling
her tusks out of the soft earth, rose, cocked her ears, drove a whistle
of astonishment through her trunk, and then scuttled off to the jungle.
"We won't follow her up," Finnerty declared; "the noosing has flustered
the old girl and we'll not get near her again to-day; she'd keep going
if she heard us and we'd lose her forever up in the hills."
Mahadua advised: "If the mahout will tickle Bahadar with his hook so
that he speak now and then, perhaps Moti, being lonesome and remembering
of cakes and home, will come back like an angry woman who has found
peace."
Thinking this a good plan, Finnerty gave the mahout orders to entice
Moti in if she came about. A dozen men were sent to bring the tiger,
slung from a pole, to the bungalow; they would bring back food to the
others.
Telling the natives he would join them in the hunt next day, Finnerty
and his companions mounted their horses to ride back.
Coming to the road that wound through the cool sal forest, they saw
Prince Ananda riding toward them.
"What luck?" he greeted when they met. "I heard that an elephant had
taken to the jungle." He wheeled his Arab with them, adding: "You look
done up. Come along to the palace and have a cooling drink."
Lord Victor ranged his horse alongside Ananda's Arab as they started,
but as they drew near the palace grounds Darpore halted his horse, and,
pointing his hunting crop across the broad valley below in which lay the
town, said: "Yonder was the road along which, so many centuries ago,
Prince Sakya Singha's mother came when he was born here in the Lumbini
Garden."
Swinton, in whose mind the prince was arraigned as a vicar of the
devil--at least as a seditious prince which, to a British officer, was
analogous--felt the curious subtlety of this speech; for, sitting his
beautiful Arab, outlined against the giant sal trees, their depths
holding the mysteries of centuries, he had an Oriental background that
made his pose compelling.
Lord Victor moved a little to one side, as if his volatile spirits felt
a dampening, the depression of a buried past; and Prince Ananda, turning
his Arab, drew Swinton along to his side by saying: "Have you come in
contact with the cleavage of religious fanaticism in India, captain?"
"My experience was only of the army; there the matter of Hindu or
Mussulman is now better understood and better arranged," Swinton
answered cautiously as he and Ananda rode forward side by side.
The captain was puzzled. Training had increased the natural bent of his
mind toward a suspicious receptivity where he felt there was necessity.
He had decided that the prince, with Oriental lethargy, never acted
spontaneously--that there was something behind every move he made; his
halt, back on the road, was evidently to make a change from Lord Victor
to himself in their alignment. Temporarily the captain fancied that the
prince might wish to draw from him some account of the preceding night's
adventure. Indeed, as a Raj horse had probably been killed, Ananda could
not have missed hearing of the accident.
It was Lord Victor's voice that stirred these thoughts to verbal
existence. "I say, Prince Ananda," he suddenly asked, "did you hear that
my mentor had been devoured by a tiger last night?"
As if startled into a remembrance, Ananda said: "Sorry, captain, I
forgot to ask if anything did happen you last night. My master of horse
reported this morning that your pony was found with a broken leg at the
foot of a cliff; then I heard that you had gone off with the major, so
knew you were all right. You see, well"--the prince spoke either in
genuine or assumed diffidence--"as it was a Raj pony that came to grief
I couldn't very well speak of it; that is, knowing that you were all
right."
"When I heard it," Gilfain broke in, "remembering what you had said
about the hunting leopard, I was deuced well bashed, I assure you."
"Was there--anything--in the report of--a tiger trying to maul you?" the
prince asked, and Swinton, tilting his helmet, found the luminous black
eyes reading his face.
But Swinton could have been plotting murder behind those "farthing eyes"
for all they betrayed as he answered: "I don't know what frightened the
animal; he suddenly shied and I was thrown out, coming a cropper on my
head which put me to sleep for a few minutes. When I came to the pony
and cart had disappeared and there was nothing for it but go back to the
major's bungalow for the night."
"Then there was nothing in the tiger story," the prince commented.
"I saw no tiger, anyway," Swinton declared, and Finnerty chuckled
inwardly, for, like the captain, he had been mystified by Darpore's
sudden interest in the latter.
The prince had presented something akin to a caste aloofness toward
Swinton; now the change had tensed Finnerty's perceptions so that he
took cognizance of things that ordinarily would have passed as trivial.
He saw Ananda deliberately ride past the road that would have taken them
to the magnificent courtyard entrance of the palace, the beautiful red
rubble road that wound its way through crotons, oleanders, and hibiscus
around the fairy Lake of the Golden Coin to cross the marble-arched
bridge. Now they were following a road that led through the zoo to the
back entrance. As they came to a massive teakwood gate, from the left of
which stretched away in a crescent sweep a wall of cages--the first one
at the very gatepost holding a fiend, a man-killing black leopard--the
major pressed his mount close to the rump of Swinton's horse, upon the
right of whom rode Prince Ananda. A guard saluted, an attendant swung
the teakwood barrier inward, and while it was still but half open Ananda
pressed forward, his horse carrying Swinton's with him into a holocaust
of lightning-like happenings.
Swinton turned toward the prince at some word, and at that instant the
latter's horse swerved against his mount, as if stung by a spur on the
outside; a black arm, its paw studded with glittering claws, flashed
through the bars of the cage with a sweep like a scimitar's, striking
Swinton full in the chest, the curved claws hooking through his khaki
coat and sweeping him half out of the saddle toward the iron bars
against which he would be ripped to pieces in a second. With an oath,
Finnerty's whip came down on his horse's flank, and the Irishman's body
was driven like a wedge between the leopard and his prey; the thrusting
weight tore the claws through the cloth of Swinton's coat, and, still
clutching viciously, they slashed Finnerty across the chest, a gash the
width of his chin showing they had all but torn through his throat.
Swinton pulled himself into the saddle and looked back at the major's
blood-smeared chin and on beyond to the sinister black creature that
stood up on his hind legs against the bars of his cage thrusting a
forepaw through playfully as though it were only a bit of feline sport.
He shuddered at the devilishness of the whole thing that looked so like
another deliberate attempt. The prince would know that that black fiend,
true to his jungle instincts, would be waiting in hiding behind the
brick wall of his cage for a slash at any warm-blooded creature rounding
the corner. They were a fighting pair, this black, murderous leopard and
the prince. Finnerty was checking the blood flow on his chin with a
handkerchief; his eyes, catching Swinton's as they turned from the
leopard, were full of fierce anger.
There had been an outburst of grating calls and deep, reverberating
roars as leopards and tigers, roused by the snarl of the black demon as
he struck, gave vent to their passion.
As if stirred to ungovernable anger by the danger his friends had
incurred through the gateman's fault, Ananda turned on the frightened
man, and, raising his whip, brought it down across his back. Twice the
lash fell, and two welts rose in the smooth black skin; this assault
accompanied by a torrent of abuse that covered chronologically the
native's ancestry back to his original progenitor, a jungle pig.
Ananda's face, livid from this physical and mental assault, smoothed out
with a look of contrite sorrow as he apologised to his companions.
"I'm awfully sorry, major; that fool nearly cost us a life by
frightening my horse with his frantic efforts to open the gate. He's an
opium eater, and must have been beating that leopard with his staff to
have made him so suddenly vicious. Your coat is ripped, captain; are you
wounded?"
"No, thanks!" Swinton answered dryly.
"You are, major."
"Nothing much--a scratch. I'll have to be careful over blood poisoning,
that's all."
"Yes," the prince said, "I'll have my apothecary apply an antiseptic."
As they wound between a spurting fountain and a semicircle of
iron-barred homes, a monkey dropped his black, spiderlike body from an
iron ring in the ceiling, and, holding by a coil in the end of his tail,
swung back and forth, head down, howling dismally. Bedlam broke forth in
answer to this discordant wail.
"Delightful place!" Finnerty muttered as he rode at Swinton's elbow.
"Inferno and the archfiend!" And Swinton nodded toward the back of
Prince Ananda, who rode ahead.
In the palace dispensary Finnerty brushed the apothecary to one side and
treated his slashed chin with iodine; a rough treatment that effectually
cleaned the cut at the bottom, which was the bone.
They did not tarry long over the champagne, and were soon in the saddle
again. Finnerty asked his companions to ride on to his bungalow for an
early dinner. Lord Victor declined, declaring he was clean bowled, but
insisted that the captain should accept. As for himself, he was going to
bed, being ghastly tired.
As Swinton and the major sat puffing their cheroots on the verandah
after dinner, the latter gave a despairing cry of "Great Kuda!" as his
eyes caught sight of the Banjara swinging up the road, evidently
something of import flogging his footsteps. "We shall now be laughed at
for not having bagged that tiger yesterday." Finnerty chuckled.
But the Lumbani was in no hurry to disburse whatever was in his mind,
for he folded his black blanket on the verandah at the top step and sat
down, salaaming in a most grave manner first. Finnerty and Swinton
smoked and talked in English, leaving the tribesman to his own
initiative. Presently he asked: "Is the young sahib who shot my dog
present?"
Relief softened the austere cast of his bony face when Finnerty answered
"No."
"It is as well," the Lumbani said, "for the young have not control of
their tongues. But the sahib"--and the Banjara nodded toward Swinton,
his eyes coming back to Finnerty's face--"is a man of discretion, is it
not so, huzoor?"
To this observation the major agreed.
"And the sahib will not repeat what I tell?"
The Lumbani rubbed his long, lean hands up and down the length of his
staff as though it were a fairy wand to ward off evil; his black,
hawklike eyes swept the compound, the verandah, as much of the bungalow
interior as they could; then pitching his voice so that it carried with
wonderful accuracy just to the ears of the two men, he said: "There was
a man beaten to-day at the gate of the tiger garden."
Neither of the sahibs answered, and he proceeded: "The gateman who was
beaten is a brother to me; not a blood brother, sahib, but a tribe
brother, for he is a Banjara of the Lumbani caste."
"By Jove!" The major clamped his jaws close after this involuntary
exclamation and waited.
"Yes, sahib"--the Lumbani had noticed with satisfaction the major's
start--"my brother has shown me the welts on his shoulder, such as are
raised on a cart bullock, but he is not a bullock, being a Banjara."
There was a little silence, the native turning over in his mind
something else he wished to say, trying to discover first what
impression he had made, his shrewd eyes searching Finnerty's face for a
sign. Suddenly, as if taking a plunge, he asked: "Does the sahib, who is
a man, approve that the servant be beaten like a dog--even though the
whip lay in the hands of a rajah?"
Finnerty hesitated. It is not well to give encouragement to a native
against the ruling powers, whether they be black or white.
"And he was not at fault," the Banjara added persuasively; "he did not
frighten the pony--it was the rajah's spur, for my brother saw blood on
the skin of the horse where the spur had cut."
"Why didn't he open the gate wide; had he orders not to do so?" Finnerty
asked quickly.
"Sahib, if the rajah had passed orders such as that he would not have
struck a Banjara like a dog, lest there be telling of the orders; but
the gate had been injured so that it would not open as always, and the
tender did not know it."
"But the rajah did not know we'd be coming along at that time," the
major parried.
"As to time, one day matters no more than another. The rajah would have
invited you through that gate some time. But he did know you were up in
the jungle, and rode forth to meet you."
"It was but a happening," Finnerty asserted, with the intent of
extracting from the Lumbani what further evidence he had.
"When one thing happens many times it is more a matter of arrangement
than of chance," the Banjara asserted.
"I don't understand," Finnerty declared.
"There is a window in the palace, sahib, directly in front of the gate,
and it has been a matter of pastime for the rajah to sit at that window
when somebody against whom he had ill will would be admitted and clawed
by that black devil."
"Impossible!"
"It is not a new thing, sahib; my brother who was beaten knows of this."
Finnerty stepped into his room, and returning placed a couple of rupees
in the ready palm of the Banjara, saying: "Your brother has been beaten
because of us, so give him this."
The Lumbani rolled the silver in the fold of his loin cloth, and,
indicating Swinton with his staff, said: "The sahib should not go at
night to the hill, neither here nor there"--he swept an arm in the
direction of the palace--"for sometimes that evil leopard is abroad at
night."
Finnerty laughed.
The Banjara scowled: "As to that, the black leopard has had neither food
nor water to-day, and if the sahibs sit up over the pool in Jadoo Nala
they may see him drink."
"We'd see a jungle pig coming out of the fields, or a muntjac deer with
his silly little bark, perhaps," Finnerty commented in quiet tolerance.
"Such do drink at the pool, but of these I am not speaking. The young
man being not with you to disarrange matters, you might happen upon
something of interest, sahib," the Banjara declared doggedly.
"We are not men to chase a phantom--to go and sit at Jadoo Pool because
a herdsman has fallen asleep on the back of a buffalo and had a dream."
Behind a faint smile the Lumbani digested this. "Very well, sahib," he
exclaimed presently, with definite determination; "I will speak. When my
brother was beaten the dust was shaken from his ears and he has heard.
Beside the big gate Darna Singh and his sister, the princess, talked
to-day, and the speech was of those who would meet in secret at the pool
to-night."
"Who meet there?"
"The rajah's name was spoken, sahib."
"How knew Darna Singh this?"
"There be always teeth that can be opened with a silver coin. Now," and
the Lumbani gathered up his black blanket, throwing it over his
shoulder, "I go to my herd, for there is a she-buffalo heavy in calf and
to-night might increase the number of my stock."
"Have patience, Lumbani," Finnerty commanded, and as the Banjara turned
to stand in waiting he added to Swinton: "What do you think, captain--we
might learn something? But there's Lord Victor; he'll expect you home."
"I'll drop him a note saying we're going to sit up over the Jadoo Pool
and to not worry if I don't get home to-night."
Finnerty brought pencil and paper, and when the note was written handed
it to the Banjara, saying: "For the young sahib at the bungalow, and if
he receives it you will be paid eight annas to-morrow."
The herdsman put the note in his loin cloth and strode away. At the turn
where Swinton had been thrown from his dogcart he dropped the note over
the cliff, explaining to the sky his reasons: "A hunt is spoiled by too
many hunters. It is not well that the young sahib reads that they go to
Jadoo Pool--it was not so meant of the gods--and as to the service, I
have eaten no salt of the sahib's, having not yet been paid."
The old chap was naturally sure that Swinton had written in the note
that the young sahib was to join them at the pool.
As he plodded downhill he formulated his excuse for nondelivery of the
note. It would be that the she-buffalo had demanded his immediate care,
and in all the worry and work it had been forgotten and then lost. It
was well to have a fair excuse to tender a sahib who put Punjabi
wrestlers on their backs.