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Other of the villagers would be down to meet Warwick Sahib as soon as they heard the shouts of his beaters but Little Shikara had been waiting almost an hour. Likely, if they had known about it, they would have commented on his badness, because he was notoriously bad, if indeed as the villagers told each other he was not actually cursed with evil spirits.
"Some time I, too, will be a hunter of tigers," Little Shikara told his mother when the beaters began to circle through the bamboos. "To carry a gun beside Warwick Sahib and to be honoured in the circle under the tree!" But his mother hardly listened. She was quivering with fright.
Only one of the brown faces he beheld was worth a lingering glance. And when he met that one his eyes halted in their sweeping survey and Warwick Sahib smiled. That face was the brown, eager visage of Little Shikara. And the blood of the boy flowed to the skin, and he glowed red all over through the brown.
If these villagers knew for certain that the Protector of the Poor lay wounded or even dead beside the ford, they would have rallied bravely, encouraged one another with words and oaths, and gone forth to rescue him; but they wholly lacked the courage to venture again into the jungle on any such blind quest as Little Shikara suggested. But the boy's father should not have laughed.
For there are certain native hunters in India that are known, far and wide, as the Shikaris; and possibly she meant in her tolerance that her little son was merely a born huntsman. But in reality Little Shikara was not named for these men at all. Rather it was for a certain fleet-winged little hawk, a hunter of sparrows, that is one of the most free spirits in all the jungle.
But still Little Shikara stood motionless and it wasn't until the thought suddenly came to him that possibly the beaters had already gathered and were telling the story of the kill that with startling suddenness he raced back through the gates to the village. Yes, the beaters had assembled in a circle under a tree, and most of the villagers had gathered to hear the story.
Thou knowest how it is held " Little Shikara didn't know exactly, but he rested the gun on Warwick's body; and he had seen enough target practice to crook his finger about the trigger. And together, the strangest pair of huntsmen that the Indian stars ever looked down upon, they waited. "It is Nahara," Warwick explained softly.
It showed him standing very straight and just as tall as his small stature would permit, and looked oddly silvery and strange on his long, dark hair. Little Shikara, son of Khoda Dunnoo, was waiting for the return of a certain idol and demigod who was even now riding home in his howdah from the tiger hunt.
These villagers not only had deserted their patron and protector, but also they had laughed at the thought of rescue! His own father had laughed at him. Little Shikara silently left the circle of villagers and turned into the darkness. At once the jungle silence closed round him. He hadn't dreamed that the noise of the villagers would die so quickly.
He sat dipping his feet in the water with little pigeon-like cries of content. "He paddles at the bow of our little shikara boat with a paddle exactly like a water-lily leaf. Do you like our friends? I love them already, and know all their affairs. And now for the boat." "One moment If we are friends on a great adventure, I must call you Vanna, and you me Stephen."
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