She raised her head against him as before, but the smell of the water caught and altered her fury more swiftly this time. Skag saw the glare go out from the great eye as the tortured mouth was cooled; and now the hope grew within him that the tigress might actually be saved. He talked softly to her as he poured drop by drop upon her tongue from the side--the little ones pressing closer and closer. Even in the convulsive trembling that took her body from time to time there was an inflowing rather than the ebb of strength.
Presently he left her long enough partly to fill the big gourd for the babies. He had scarcely drawn back before the first was at the edge.
Lapping was not enough for this infant. He wanted to cover himself; apparently to overturn the dish upon himself. The others helped to balance the gourd for a moment or two, but the ma.s.sed effort became too furious and over it went among them. Skag laughed. Only a portion was wasted, for the kittens followed the little streams on the rock, tonguing them as they moved and filled. He tried them again, only covering the bottom of the gourd, but it was as swiftly overturned.
Still the young had drunk enough presently and went to tearing at the meat in the deeper shadows.
Skag went back to the mother, still using the canteen for her.
Alternately now he dropped the water upon the wound in her shoulder.
There were hours of work here to soften the fever crust and establish drainage. Some time afterward this work was stopped abruptly by the warning of Nels at the door. Skag stood his canteen against a rock and hurried forth. Nels stood at the mouth of the lair, his head turned up the river bed. His eyes did not alter from their look of fixity as the man emerged. The shoulder nearest Skag merely twitched a trifle, the left paw lifting to the toes. Skag followed the Dane"s eyes.
The great male himself stood stock-still in the centre of the river bed, the carca.s.s of a lamb having dropped from his mouth. So strange, so vast and still, the picture, that it seemed dreamlike; the great, round, sunny eyes unwinking--serious rather than savage--a dark-banded thing of gold in the ruddy gold of late afternoon.
Skag was silent, the magic of the moment flowing into him. Nels had not moved. Skag had been forced to walk round him to find room to stand. They faced the big Bengali together for an instant, the man"s hand dropping softly to the dog"s shoulder.
"The king himself, son," Skag whispered raptly. "He"s the loveliest thing in stripes. We"ll have to look out for this fellow, Nels.
There"s no fear in him. We"re on his premises and the missus is sick and needs quiet. He"s apt to charge, and I can see his point of view.
We"ll back down, son, and not obstruct the gentleman"s door."
They couldn"t have been three seconds clambering down the rocks to the nullah bed, yet the male tiger was twenty feet nearer when they looked up. Moreover, he had brought the lamb with him, and this time he kept it in his mouth as he watched.
"We mustn"t let him see our dark side again, Nels," Skag muttered.
"See if we can"t stare as straight as he does. G.o.d, what a picture!
Yet I"m rather glad he"s got that lamb. He must have brought it far.
Carrying out her orders doubtless. Only a great male would do that.
Oh, it"s not that he cares for the babies, Nels. It"s to please her that he does it! And she"s down and done, but running the lair!"
So Skag talked, hardly knowing what he said, keeping in touch with Nels with his hand and holding the eyes of the royal beast that seemed to be made of patience and poise and gilded beauty. Skag didn"t step back, but presently to the side, away from the mouth of the lair. The tiger"s counter movement was not to lessen the distance between them this time, but to drop to his haunches, still holding his game. He rocked a little on his hind feet, that ominous undulation which portends the charge. Not more than ten seconds pa.s.sed and no outward change was apparent, yet there was a relief of tension in Skag"s voice.
"It"s the little lamb that saved us that time, Nels. I think we"ve pa.s.sed it--pa.s.sed the crisis, my boy. We"ll just stand by now and measure patience with him."
It was two minutes before Skag ventured a further movement to the right. The tiger made absolutely no counter this time. Skag now spoke to Nels:
"You"re doing beautifully, son."
The dog had stood by like part of himself. The droop and the quiver that he had known twice that day when the man disappeared into the lair had given way in the real test to unbreakable nerve and defiant heart.
Yet it was less the courage than his absolute obedience that entered the man with a charge of feeling that instant. A minute later Skag took another ten steps to the right.
In the deeper shadows, less than an hour afterward, he struck a match to the little supper fire a hundred yards up the slope from the mouth of the lair. Skag then loosened his hunting belt, dropping the weight from him to the blanket with a sigh of content. The hardware had chafed him all day and had only been really forgotten in the stresses of action.
"I didn"t pack that gun for tiger," he said softly. "Why, I would as soon have shot our good Arab, Kala Khan, or put a bullet between Nut Kut"s eyes, as to stop that big fellow bringing young mutton home--to please her! Won"t Carlin love to hear that! Oh, yes, it"s been a day, son, one more day! I"ve loved it minute by minute, and you"ve been--well, I can"t think in words, when it comes to that."
The big fellow drowsed in the firelight, his four paws stretched evenly toward the man.
In the morning and afternoon of the next two days Skag brought water to the tigress and bathed her shoulder long. On the third day he could not be sure that the male had left the lair until late afternoon, and when he finally ventured to the mouth and his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness within he saw that the tigress was watching him from the deeper shadows--not p.r.o.ne, but on three feet.
He filled the gourd and weighted it with stones; then backed out.
"We"re starting for Hurda to-night, son," he said to Nels. "I"ve left her a drink or two, and by the time she needs more, she"ll be able to get to the river herself."
Carlin must have caught the reality of that moment of crisis from Skag"s telling--the moment when the male tiger might have charged but didn"t, because she succeeded in making Malcolm M"Cord see it, too.
"And you say there was no sign from the tiger, but that Hantee Sahib knew when the instant was past?" the famous marksman repeated curiously.
Carlin nodded.
"But how did he know?"
"Ask him," she said.
"Huh," he muttered. "I might as well enquire of the Dane beastie."
CHAPTER XVI
_Fever Birds_
Carlin had been listless for a day or two. This was several weeks after her forty-two hours on Mitha Baba. They were still living in Malcolm M"Cord"s bungalow. Skag woke in the night, not with a dream, but rather with a memory. He was broad awake and recalled an incident that had entirely escaped his day-thoughts for a long time. It had to do with that hard-testing period, just after his meeting with Carlin, when he had journeyed to Poona to confer with the eldest brother, Roderick Deal, and had been forced to wait more than a month. In that interval he had learned about hyenas at first hand, through the plight of Beatrice Hichens and the children; also his servant Bhanah had come to him, and the Great Dane, Nels; still it had been a vague stretch of days, in retrospect.
It was during the return-trip to Hurda that the thing happened which held him now as he lay broad awake. Toward twilight, as the train halted at one of the civil stations, a white-covered cot was lifted aboard. There was a kind of silence about that station. The mountains were near on the left hand which was to the West. The white glare of Indian day had softened into delicate rose. A haze of orange and bronze lay upon the lower slopes of the mountains, magically enriching the greens; and the blue against which the mountains were contoured, was pure and immense and still. It was difficult to remember the fret and pain and discolouration of a world bathed in so vast a peace. . . .
At first he thought that the body on the cot was in its shroud. The hush about it and from the mountains touched him with a feeling that he had not quite known before, the depth of it having to do with Carlin.
Then he saw, back of the natives who had lifted the cot, yet not too near, the figure of an Englishman of the Military--standing quietly by, as if casually ordering a platoon of soldiers in the duty of loading the train. Now Skag looked at the man"s face. It had nothing to do with the lax grace of the officer"s figure. This was the face of a man who could endure anything without a cry--a narrow face, tanned and a bit hard possibly from years of self-repression--a silent man, doubtless loved for the _feeling_ around him, rather than because of what he was accustomed to say or do--a face stricken now to the verge of chaos--unchanging anguish of fear and loneliness and sorrow imprinted from within. A strange white glow, that had nothing to do with the tan, shone forth from the skin--etheric disruption, subtler than the breakdown of mere cells. This man would put a bullet in his brain if pressed too far, but he would not cry out. Just now he was close to his limit.
Skag knew something of what pa.s.sed in the English officer"s heart, because he himself was learning what love means. Before his hour with Carlin in the afterglow, on their way back from the monkey glen, he would never have dreamed that there was such feeling in the world; in fact, he would have been unable to read the vivid story of it in the officer"s face. . . . So much in a second or two.
The cot had been partly lifted into the coach. The face now was uncovered--the white wasted face of a lovely woman, a woman still living; an utterly delicate face, telling the story of one who had never met a rough impact from the world. It was as if there had always been a strong hand between her and the grit and the grind of world-affairs--first her father"s and then the lover"s. In the great silence, the eyelids opened. It seemed that night and chill had suddenly come in. The lips moved. The most mournful and hopeless voice spoke straight into Skag"s eyes:
"Oh, won"t you please stop those fever birds!"
Skag supposed it an isolated sentence of delirium. He didn"t understand. There was a drive of drama or tragedy back of it, but his mind did not give him details. He did not see the English officer again. He did not know if he entered the train. One thing Skag knew: Deep under that narrow masculine face there was a capacity for feeling that this officer"s men never saw; that his closest a.s.sociates never saw. The American reverenced the secret. . . . Sometimes during the hushes of the night, when the train stopped for a moment, Skag lying awake, heard the voice of the woman. There was a feeling from it utterly strange to him. It carried him out of himself, as if he shared something of her delirium and something of the man"s agony.
The next day was one of the hardest that Skag ever lived, for Carlin was not at Hurda to meet him. She had gone with a strange elephant into the country. That was the day of the chase on the great young elephant Gunpat Rao, the day in which the story of the monster Kabuli unfolded. The face of the man at the mountain station and the sentence of the woman were completely erased from his surface consciousness, as the memory of an illness.
That was months away, and life had been very full in between. . . .
Carlin said she was just tired, when he went to her room in the morning. She looked at him long. It suddenly came to him vaguely, that she wasn"t thinking; rather that her eyes were merely turned to his face. A queer breathlessness came to him a little later, as her head rolled to one side--such a sinking of weakness in the movement.
It reminded him with a shock that she had never seemed quite tireless since that long ride on Mitha Baba"s neck. But never before had her face turned away from him.
And now he saw a certain inimitable loveliness of her. There were no words to describe the last--only that it was Spirit made of all the dusks and all the white fires. There was something little about her that called an undreamed-of tenderness; and something superb and mysterious, so vast that he could be held in it like a toy in the hands.
Burning Indian day was walled and curtained and barred from the place where she lay. White of the walls, white of her face, white of the pallet--the rest a breathless, ungleaming shadow that held a heat not from the sun, as it seemed, but from the centre of the earth.
. . . Skag was away in timelessness and an unfamiliar s.p.a.ce. This s.p.a.ce was not fixed to one dimension, but moved back and forth. As Bhanah came to him, he saw more than Bhanah animate upon the features--like someone who had belonged always, whom he had known for ages, whom Carlin had always known. So many things struck him differently now; as if they belonged not just to this crisis, but to a crisis of eons.
Yet externals in the main were so trifling. Carlin didn"t eat; people seemed to take that as significant. Malcolm M"Cord came. Margaret Annesley came. Horace d.i.c.kson"s father came. Skag went to the bazaars and back again. He went to the monkey glen. It was all a blur. Once he caught himself walking on the great Highway-of-all-India; and once deep in the jungle. He pa.s.sed the civil surgeon of Hurda on his own verandah; and someone said that the old "family doctor" was to come from Poona. . . . Now he was in Carlin"s room and Carlin was looking at him. He saw her face the moment he entered the room, and the fact that he had come in from the fierce daylight into the shadows did, not seem to blur his eyes, even for a second.