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"When a local god reappears on earth, it's always an excuse for trouble of some kind; and those Satpura Bhils are about as wild as your grandfather left them, young un. It means something." "Meanin' they may go on the war-path?" said Chinn. "'Can't say as yet. 'Shouldn't be surprised a little bit." "I haven't been told a syllable." "'Proves it all the more. They are keeping something back."
"You know you've an ancestor buried down Satpura way, don't you?" said the Major, as Chinn smiled irresolutely. It lies in a worn old ledger on the Chinese lacquer table behind the piano in the Devonshire home, and the children are allowed to look at it on Sundays. "Well, I wasn't sure.
"Bukta tells me everything, too, as a rule. Now, why didn't he tell me that?" Chinn put the question directly to the old man that night, and the answer surprised him. "Why should I tell what is well known? Yes, the Clouded Tiger is out in the Satpura country." "What do the wild Bhils think that it means?" They do not know. They wait. Sahib, what is coming?
"I see that it is the truth," was the answer, in a shaking voice. "Jan Chinn goes abroad among the Satpuras, riding on the Clouded Tiger, ye say? Be it so. Therefore the sign of the wonder is for the Satpura Bhils only, and does not touch the Bhils who plough in the north and east, the Bhils of the Khandesh, or any others, except the Satpura Bhils, who, as we know, are wild and foolish."
The explanation, as it seemed to him, came at the change of the moon, when he received orders to hold himself in readiness to "allay any possible excitement" among the Satpura Bhils, who were, to put it mildly, uneasy because a paternal Government had sent up against them a Mahratta State-educated vaccinator, with lancets, lymph, and an officially registered calf.
If the Satpura Bhils kept to their villages, and did not wander after dark, they would not see him. Indeed, Bukta, it is no more than that he would see the light again in his own country. Send this news south, and say that it is my word." Bukta bowed to the floor. "Good Heavens!" thought Chinn, "and this blinking pagan is a first-class officer, and as straight as a die!
With the progress of research it became apparent that the Mon-Khmer group of Indo-China thus constituted, to which the Khasis belong, was in some way connected with the large linguistic family in the Indian Peninsula once called Kolarian, but now more generally known as Munda, who inhabit the hilly region of Chutia Nagpur and parts of the Satpura range in the Central Provinces.
It is written in the chronicles of the Satpura Bhils, together with many other matters not fit for print, that through five days, after the day that he had put his mark upon them, Jan Chinn the First hunted for his people; and on the five nights of those days the tribe was gloriously and entirely drunk.
Many of them could hardly be distinguished from low-caste Hindoo farmers; but in the south, where John Chinn the First was buried, the wildest still clung to the Satpura ranges, cherishing a legend that some day Jan Chinn, as they called him, would return to his own. In the mean time they mistrusted the white man and his ways.
It is supposed to be a clouded animal not stripy, but blotchy, like a tortoise-shell tom-cat. No end of a brute, it is, and a sure sign of war or pestilence or or something. There's a nice family legend for you." "What's the origin of it, d' you suppose?" said Chinn. "Ask the Satpura Bhils. Old Jan Chinn was a mighty hunter before the Lord.
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