"It is India," said Skag.
Every little while through the dragging hours, Cadman would laugh softly; and if there had been silence for long, the warning snarl would come back. The breath of it shook the air and the thresh of the tail kept the dust astir in the pit.
"There is only one more thing I can think of," Cadman said at last.
The waning moon was now in meridian and blent with daylight. The beast was still crouched against the wall.
"Yes?" said Skag.
"That you should walk over and stroke his head."
"Oh, no, he is cornered. He would fight."
"There"s really a kind of law about all this--?"
"Very much a law."
After an interval Cadman breathed: "I like it. Oh, yes," he added wearily, "I like it all."
It was soon after that they heard the voices of natives and a face, looking grey in the dawn, peered down. Cadman spoke in a language the native understood:
"Look in the tea-pot and toss down my cigarettes--"
At this instant the tiger protested a second time. The native vanished with the squeak of a fat puppy that falls off a chair on its back. For moments afterward, they heard him calling and telling others the tale of all his born days. Three quarters of an hour elapsed before the long pole, thick as a man"s arm, was carefully lowered. Skag guided the b.u.t.t to the base of the pit, and fixed it there as far as possible from the tiger. This was delicate. His every movement was maddeningly deliberate, the danger, of course, being to put the tiger into a fighting panic.
"Now you climb," Skag said.
"No--"
"It is better so. I am old at these things. He will not leap at you while I am here--"
"You mean he might leap, as you start to shin up the pole--alone?"
"No, that will be the second time. It will not infuriate him--the second one to climb."
"I"ll gamble with you--who goes first."
"You said that you were taking orders," Skag said coldly.
"That"s a fact. But this isn"t to my relish, son--"
"We do not need more words."
Cadman Sahib had reached safety. The natives were around him, feeling his arms and limbs, stuttering questions. He bade them be silent, caught up his rifle and covered the tiger, while Skag made the tilted pole, beckoning the rifle back.
"It"s been a hard night for him," he said.
The two men stood together in the morning light. Cadman"s face was deeply shaded by the big helmet again, but his eyes bored into the young one"s as he offered his cigarette-case. Skag took one, lit it carelessly. Cadman was watching his hands.
"You"ve got it, son," he said.
"Got what?"
"The good grey nerve. . . . Not a flicker in your hand. I wanted to know. . . . Say, cheer up--"
Skag was looking toward the tiger trap.
"Ah, I see," said Cadman Sahib.
"The circus is a hard life," Skag said.
That was a kind of a feast day. . . . At noon the natives had the tiger up in sunlight, caged in bamboo. Skag presently came into a startling kind of joy to hear his friend make an offer to buy the beast. Negotiations moved slowly, but the thing was done. That afternoon the journey toward Coldwater Ruins was continued with eight carriers, the tiger swung between them. Skag was mystified. What could Cadman mean? What could he do with a tiger at the Ruins or in the Monkey Forest? The natives apparently had not been told the destination, but they must know soon. It was all strange. Skag liked it better alone with his friend. Halt was called that afternoon, the sun still in the sky. The two white men walked apart.
"You get the drift, my son?"
Skag shook his head.
"Of course, the natives won"t like it; they won"t understand. But we"re sure he isn"t a man-eater--"
Skag"s chest heaved.
"I never knew a more decent tiger--" Cadman went on. "Besides, he"s a friend of yours, and not too expensive--"
"You bought him to--"
"I bought him for you, son--a tribute to the nerviest white man I ever stepped with--"
That evening a great whine went up from the bearers. It appears that while some were cutting wood, others preparing supper and others gathering dry gra.s.s for beds, the younger white man, who had made magic with the tiger in the pit, suddenly failed in his powers. The natives were sure it was not their fault that the cover had not been securely fastened. The bearers repeated they were all at work and could find no fault with themselves. They were used to dealing with white men who did not permit bungling. Their wailing was very loud. . . . To lose such a tiger was worth more than many natives, some white men would say. . . . But Cadman Sahib was rich. He fumed but little; being of all white men most miraculously compa.s.sionate. . . . Also it was true the beast, though full grown, was not a man-eater. . . .
"And to-morrow we shall go on alone--it is much pleasanter," said Skag, after all was still and they lay down together.
CHAPTER II
_Son of Power_
His Indian name was given to Skag in the great Gra.s.s Jungle; but he did not know the meaning of the words when they first fell upon his ear.
There India herself first opened for him the magic gates that seal her mystery. But he did not know it was her glamour that made him utterly forget outside things, in the unbelievable loveliness of Gra.s.s Jungle days; did not know it was just as much her spell that made him forget his own birthright, in the paralysis of perfect fear.
A part of her mystery is this forgetting--while she reveals canvas after canvas of life--uncovers layer beneath layer of her deeper marvels. Skag was involved with his animals--and interests peculiarly personal--till it all came to seem like a dream. Yet underneath his surface consciousness it was working in him, as the glamour of India always does, to colour his entire future--as the magic of India always will.
After their night in the tiger pit-trap, Cadman and Skag had wandered southeast-ward--still searching for the Monkey Forest and the Coldwater Ruins--and had become lost to the world and the ways of civilisation in the mazes of the Mahadeo mountains. They had found a dozen jungles full of monkeys, but none of them looked to Cadman like his dream. The monkeys were all so melted-in to everything else; and there was so much too much of everything else.
As for Ruins, the thing they found was too old. It was like an exposure of the sins of first men--alive with bats and smaller vermin. The monkeys there had preserved from age to age the germs of all depravity.