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It was not because of him that the herd-leader had spoken in warning. Another buck, younger but nearly equal in girth, had come upon him, and thought to steal away his harem. In this he was premature, since neither doe nor female fawn would be ready to mate until Spring. But such mistakes are often made, born of the cold and bitter isolation of a solitary male in Winter.
A herd-leader begins to think about future contestants for his place as soon as he acquires the leadership. But Hai! This little one would not have his greatest strength for fifteen years. It was a compact, medium-sized herd vast males, mothers, old-maid elephants, long-legged and ungainly, young males just learning their strength and proud of it beyond words, and many calves.
This occasion, however, seemed of little moment. Hiram Bassett owned a huge red herd-leader that was the terror of the countryside; but it was a fact, as Helen said, that the cattle were not likely to be roaming the pasture at this time of year. "Come on!" said Tom, again. "The car was to go down to the Cheslow station for father and stop at the mill for us on its return.
"I'll tell you," answered Tusker, who heard what the little elephant asked. "The other day," went on the big chap, "I went to the top of the hill over there," and he pointed with his trunk. "I heard up there a noise like thunder, but it was not thunder." "What was it?" asked Umboo, who liked to listen to the talk of the old herd-leader. The other little elephants also gathered around to listen.
But he was too proud to chase a beaten elephant for long. He halted, trumpeting, and swung back to his mud-bath. But he did not enter the mud again. All at once he remembered the herd and the fights of his calfhood. All at once he knew that his craft and strength and power were beyond that of any elephant in all the jungle. Who was the great, arrogant herd-leader to stand against him?
And for several moments it looked very much as though Hiram Bassett's herd-leader was going to reach his prey. The thunder of his hoofs was in their ears. They did not speak again as they came to the steep bank down to the open creek. There, just before them, was an old hollow stump, perhaps ten feet high, with the opening on the creek side. All three of them knew it well.
The Bab movement in the East, the Salvation Army at home, show us this principle still operative; what a "little flock" dominated by a suitable herd-leader and swayed by love and adoration can do and these, like Christianity itself, began as small and inconspicuous groups.
And it may be, it may very possibly be, that, in the matter of this Friend behind phenomena our own yearning and our own almost ineradicable instinctive conviction, since they are certainly not founded on either reason or observation, are in origin the groping of a lonely-souled gregarious animal to find its herd or its herd-leader in the great spaces between the stars.
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