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A steady beat through Skag's tortured mind was Deenah's story of the monster Kabuli; no softness nor mercy in those details. He had watched, in the Deputy, a man unfold, after the mysterious manner of the English. He had entered suddenly, abruptly into one of the most enthralling centres of fascination in Indian life the elephant service.
. . . They were walking rapidly toward the house of the chief commissioner whom Deenah said was away in the villages. Their hope of life and death fell upon the Deputy Commissioner-Sahib. Always as he spoke, Deenah's face steadily grew more grey, the rims of his eyes more red.
He had seen the exalted and complicated mechanism of a Chief Commissioner's Headquarters get down to individual business with remarkable speed and not the loss of an ounce of dignity. But under every feeling and thought was the slow bass beat of Deenah's story about the monster Kabuli. Nels had been called to the trail in the very hour of his arrival.
He tried to think of the Kabuli as if he were an animal. A man might have a destroying enmity against a cobra or a tiger or a python; but it was not black and self-defiling like this thing which crept over him, out of the miasma of Deenah's tale. In the dawn they reached a small river.
The Kabuli did not care for the plan, but Deenah repeated that he could not do this thing alone; his voice admirably gentle, as he reiterated his own helplessness. . . . Still he granted with hesitation that the Sahiba deigned to trust him to a degree. . . . At this moment the Kabuli saw Deenah's eyes forking at the treasure-pack. There was longing in them that was pain.
Deenah's voice was gentle as he enquired how he was to be used why riches accrued to him, since it was the life of the life of his mistress to serve those ill or in need, body or soul.
"And you permit this bazaar-tamasha in your compound?" Deenah observed that this was not an affair upon which he could speak to the Sahiba, his mistress. Meanwhile Carlin watched Deenah's eyes fill with the keen reds of bloody memory. "Go away, Margaret," Carlin said. "He will talk to me. Please go now. In six breaths he will be back in his trance again " So it happened.
It was many weeks after that when the case was called, and Deenah's eyes grew red-rimmed like a pit-terrier's as he told the story again, but his voice fondled the ears of those present in the court-room. . . . One by one, the other four Kabulies left the market-place in Hurda; and when the monster himself had been made to pay and his healing had been uninterrupted for many weeks, there came, a day when the unwalled city of Hurda knew him no more.
So Deenah's wife and the other women came, bringing the smooth hand stones with which they ground the spices into curry powder. . . . And when the beating was over, they carefully tied up the pack of the Kabuli and sealed it without a single article missing.
And now Skag heard of the coming of the messenger with the strange elephant; and the black edging began to run about Deenah's tale, as he revealed the ugly possibilities in his own mind that the Monster Kabuli had his part in this sending: ". . . Now Hantee Sahib must learn," Deenah finished, "that not within four hours' journey from Hurda; nay, not within six hours' journey from Hurda, is there any native prince with the dignity of one elephant."
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