"But this time I owned that the brute deserved punishment, for a more forlorn little tragedy than that which was being enacted among the pots and pans I never saw.
"Mohubbut Khan, chief villain, was seated--naked to the waist, bald as to head, after the manner of native cooks at work, on a low reed stool, brandishing a knife in one hand, while the other held a skrawking leggy white c.o.c.k.
"Exactly in front of him was a group more suggestive of monkeys than men. It consisted of a very old man, wizened, bandy-legged, bandy-armed, whose white teeth showed in animal perfection as he howled, and a child of the same build, clinging to him convulsively, all legs, and arms, and shrieks.
"Between them and the cook stood Graham. He was a big fellow; fair as you are. In fact you are rather like him. There was a moment"s pause, during which the old anatomy"s voice rose in plaintive howls of resignation.
""Lo! sonling, be comforted. Death comes to all, even to white c.o.c.ks.
It is but a few years. And grand-dad will hatch another. It is a sacrifice. Sacrifice to the _sahib logue_ who bring death as they choose!"
"Well, it turned out, of course, to be a case of wanton cruelty. It always is. For hopeless inability to be considerate commend me to a native jack-in-office. There were fifty other fowls in the neighbouring village, but nothing would serve the underling whose duty it was to collect supplies, but that this wretched child"s pet should serve for the _Huzoor"s_ dinner. The old man"s joy when it was released was purely pitiable. He would have reared another for his grandson, he a.s.serted garrulously; ay! even to the hatching of an egg from the very beginning, with toil by day and night. But only the Great G.o.d knew if the child"s heart would have gone out to the chick as it had to the c.o.c.k, for the heart was capricious. It was not to be counted upon, since the Great G.o.d made some men, yea! even some _Huzoors_, different from others. He looked from Graham to me as he spoke, and somehow I felt small. So as Graham was evidently master of the situation, I slunk back to my work.
"There were sounds of woe thereinafter from the cook-room tent, and Graham himself supervised the dinner that night, in order, he explained somewhat apologetically, that I might not suffer from his conceptions of duty.
"It was two days after this, and we had shifted camp fifteen miles, when, having occasion to go into Graham"s tent after dark, I stumbled over some one sitting among the corner tent-pegs. It was the grandpapa of the white c.o.c.k, and he explained to me in his lingo--for he was one of the jungle people--that he had come in exchange for that precious bird. One life or another mattered little. Grim-_sahib_ had spared the child"s heart"s joy, which was now living with him in the maternal mansion. There being, therefore, no necessity for the occupation of hatching eggs, he, Bunder--yea! of a surety, it was the same name as that of the monkey people--had come to do service to the _Huzoors_ instead of the white c.o.c.k.
"That was absolutely all I could get out of him. So for days and weeks he followed us. He was useful in his way, especially to Graham, who had a pa.s.sion not only for sport, but for all sorts of odd knowledge."
I remember interrupting here that that was half the pleasure of new surroundings, to which my fellow-traveller replied drily that he had expected I would say so, as I really reminded him very much of Graham.
"This pa.s.sion of his, however, led him into being a bit reckless, and as the hot weather came on he began to get touched up by fever. Still, he continued working during the off days, and seemed little the worse until one evening when he went to bed with the shivers after a leopard hunt. Then old Bunder crept over to my tent.
""Grim-_sahib_ must go home across the Black Water at once, _Huzoor_,"
he said quietly, "or his bones will whiten the jungle. He has seen the Skeleton Tree."
"That was, in essence, all he had to say, though his explanations were lengthy. It was simply a Skeleton Tree, and it was always seen where fire fingers met; but those who saw it became skeletons in the jungle before long unless they possessed a certain talisman. There were such talismans among the hill tribes, and those who fell sick of fever always wore one if they could compa.s.s it. That was not often, since they were rare. He himself had one, but what use was it when life, from old age, had become no more worth than a white c.o.c.k"s? So his grandson wore it; wore it as he fed the joy of his heart peacefully in the ancestral home; thanks to Grim-_sahib!_
""But how do you know he saw the Tree?" I asked.
""It was when we had crawled up nigh the end of a dip, _Huzoor_,"
replied Bunder. "He looked up and said, "What"s that?" And when I asked him what he had seen, he said: "It is gone. It must have been that stunted tree. But it looked like a skeleton, and there were fire fingers round it." So I knew. Send him home, _Huzoor_, away from its power, or his bones will whiten the jungle."
"During the following days I really began--though I"m not an imaginative chap--to feel a bit queer about things. Graham couldn"t shake off his fever, and more than once when he was delirious in the evenings he would startle me by saying, "What"s that?" But he would laugh the next moment, and add, "Only a tree, of course; it was the light."
"There was no doctor within miles; and, besides, it was not really such a bad case as all that. At least it didn"t seem so to me or to Graham himself. Only to old Bunder, who became quite a nuisance with his warnings, so that I was glad when, after a confused rigmarole about white c.o.c.ks and sacrifices, he disappeared one day and was seen no more. Partly, perhaps, because we moved back to a higher camp in the hopes of escaping the malaria.
"But we didn"t. Graham grew appreciably worse. He was fairly well by day; it was at night that the fever seemed to grip him. I used to sit up with him till twelve or one o"clock, and then turn in till about dawn, when the servants had orders to call me, and I would go over and see after him again.
"But one day, or rather night, it was still quite dark when my bearer roused me with his persistent drone of "_Saheeb, saheeb!_" and I knew in an instant something was wrong. Graham, shortly after I left him, had got out of bed, dressed himself in his shikar clothes, taken his gun, and gone away from the camp. His bearer, a lad whom he had promoted to the place in one of his impulsive generous fits of revolt against things unjustifiable, had failed to take alarm until his master"s prolonged absence had made him seek and rouse my man. The latter was full of apologies; but what else, he protested, could be expected of babes and sucklings promoted out of due season? The babe and suckling meanwhile was blubbering incoherently, and a.s.serting that he was not to blame. The _sahib_ had called for Bunder and Bunder had come; and they had gone off together.
""Bunder?" I exclaimed. "Impossible! He hasn"t been near the camp for days. Did any one else see him?" But no one had. And as there was no time to be lost in inquiries I dismissed the idea as an attempt on the boy"s part to relieve himself from responsibility, and organised the whole camp into a search party.
"It was a last-quarter moon, and I shall never forget the eeriness of that long, fruitless search. At first I kept calling "Graham, Graham!"
but after a time I felt this to be useless, and that he must be either unconscious, or delirious, or determined to keep out of our way. So I pushed on and on in silence, through the bushes and bents, expecting the worst. But after all it was the best. We found him at dawn lying under one of those stunted trees fast asleep. So sound asleep that he did not wake when we carried him back to camp on a litter of boughs.
So sound that it was not until the afternoon, when he stirred and asked for beef-tea, that I discovered he wore round his neck a plaited cord of dirty red silk with a small bag attached to it.
""How the deuce did that come there?" he asked drowsily, putting his hand up to feel it. How, indeed? He could never explain; and the bag held nothing but a bit of blank paper folded into four. He took the thing to England with him when he went home on sick leave the next month, and so far as I know is no wiser than he was then as to how it came round his neck."
Here my fellow-traveller paused, as a whistle from the engine told we were pulling up again. "Well," I said, a trifle plaintively, "but why should not I?"
He was already standing on the platform among a miscellaneous pile of belongings, such as Indian travellers delight to carry about with them, ere he replied:--
"Good-by. Glad to have met you--for you remind me awfully of Graham!"
I sometimes wonder if I should have taken his warning seriously or treated it as a traveller"s tale. As it was, I had not the chance of testing its truth. For, at my destination, I found a telegram recalling me to England on urgent business. So, beyond that pa.s.sing glimpse of the Skeleton Tree, I have no experience.