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The earth-smells filled her nostrils, her lungs, her blood; tree-gums, sandal-wood, perfume-bark, body-warmth charging the air. And over all wild, and wistful, and pulsing-tender the weaving of Mitha Baba's enchantment through the dark. The thudding all about her on the ground must be the sound of many wild feet! This must be the "toiling in."
. . . They were well up in the mountains, so far that the trees had become massive of body and heavy and dense of top the moon only just showing through when they heard the trumpeting of elephants, off toward the east. Mitha Baba answered at once, turning abruptly toward the east. "Mitha Baba!" the Gul Moti protested, "our people have never gone off in this direction where are we, anyway?"
From the elephant standpoint, a small Englishman was conceding a certain amount of convenience to men. "You see," the boy went on, "an elephant lives anyway more than a hundred years; and his name stays just like that and draws pay without changing. Always a mahout's son takes his place, when he gets too old or dies. I can recall when Mitha Baba's mahout was one of the most wonderful of them all.
And Mitha Baba scarcely broke her stride, which was lengthening every step, as she obediently circled the old man with her trunk and carelessly flung him on her neck. "We'll fetch them all home!" the Gul Moti's voice floated back, as they melted away into the night. The Chief Commissioner gave Son-of-Power his hand being without words, for the moment. "Is she safe?" Skag asked.
She's entirely competent, is Mitha Baba; she's the leader of my caravan next to Neela Deo. Of course Neela Deo is our only hope of overtaking them; he's fast enough, but this is rather soon after his injury, and he'll have to rest a bit. In the meantime, come away up to the house; we'll talk there." To possess one white elephant is calamity.
The Gul Moti's confidence in the great female's intention to protect her, was established! At last, lifting her head sharply to utter a different call, Mitha Baba developed a peculiar drive in her motion; a queer drive in the whole huge body that had something to do with a wide swinging of the head.
The boy became a bit embarrassed; hesitating, before he went on: "The Hakima used to speak to her whenever she passed Miss Annesley's bungalow; and now she's not there to do it." Horace waved his hand to Mitha Baba's mahout; and the mahout shouted something in a dialect Skag did not know.
Now the elephants of the Chief Commissioner's stockades gave account of themselves. Youth had returned to them courage had been restored. They clamoured to heaven that they were doing well. They shouted to the universe that they belonged to him to Neela Deo, their King! Sanford Hantee scarcely saw an impossible thing Carlin on Mitha Baba's neck!
"It was there Mitha Baba found them," the Gul Moti explained. "It was there she did the 'toiling in. Then, she was leading them home to Hurda, when we met the caravan at dawn." Some of the mahouts had gathered about. The Chief Commissioner spoke to them in their speech and they answered him calling others.
Mitha Baba, having come in closer than any of the other females, did not move, save for a constant turning of her head under the Gul Moti's icy fingers seeming to keep an eye on all the separate fights at once. Her fear for the caravan elephants was anguish, her fatigue extreme; but excitement held the Gul Moti in a vise. She saw the fighters meet, skull to skull.
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