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But they were not to have any such horror story to tell their wives. Only one of the three by the ford, Singhai, the gun-bearer, was even really unconscious; Little Shikara, the rifle still held lovingly in his arms, had gone into a half-faint from fear and nervous exhaustion, and Warwick Sahib had merely closed his eyes to the darting light of the firebrands.
If it hadn't been for a purple moon that came peering up above the dark jungle just at nightfall, it would have been impossible to tell that Little Shikara was at his watch. He was really just the colour of the shadows a rather pleasant brown he was very little indeed, and besides, he was standing very, very still.
He should have remembered the few past occasions when his straight little son had gone into the jungle alone; and that remembrance should have silenced him. The difficulty lay in the fact that he supposed his boy and he were of the same flesh, and that Little Shikara shared his own great dread of the night-curtained jungle. In this he was very badly mistaken.
On May 26th we took shikara and paddled across the Dal Lake to see something of the Mohammedan festival, consisting in a pilgrimage to the Mosque of Hasrat Bal, where a hair of the prophet's beard is the special object of adoration. As we neared the goal the plot thickened.
Far away, the trumpet-call of a wild tusker trembled through the moist, hot night; and great bell-shaped flowers made the air pungent and heavy with perfume. A tigress skulked somewhere in a thicket licking an injured leg with her rough tongue, pausing to listen to every sound the night gave forth. Little Shikara whispered in his sleep.
He knew more about the wild animals than any mature native in the assembly, and his comments on the hunting stories were usually worth hearing. "We will not be in the honoured service of the Protector of the Poor at this time a year from now," he said. They all waited tensely. Shikara shivered. "Speak, Khusru," they urged him.
A half mile distant, in his richly furnished bungalow, Warwick Sahib dozed over his after-dinner cigar. He was in evening clothes, and crystal and silver glittered on his board. But his gray eyes were half closed; and the gleam from his plate could not pass the long, dark lashes. For his spirit was far distant, too on the jungle trails with that of Little Shikara.
Warwick Sahib was going to make what was the nearest approach to a speech that he had made since various of his friends had decoyed him to a dinner in London some years before. The words that he said, the short vernacular words that have a way of coming straight to the point, established Little Shikara as a legend through all that corner of British India.
"And what, little hawk, wilt thou have more?" he asked. Little Shikara trembled and raised his eyes. "Only sometimes to ride with thee, in thy howdah, as thy servant, when thou again seekest the tiger." The whole circle laughed at this. They were just human, after all. Their firebrands were held high, and gleamed on Little Shikara's dusky face, and made a lustre in his dark eyes.
Little Shikara glanced once at the lean, bronzed face, the limp, white, thin hands, and something like a shiver of ecstasy went clear to his ten toes. For like many other small boys, all over the broad world, he was a hero-worshipper to the last hair of his head; and this quiet man on the elephant was to him beyond all measure the most wonderful living creature on the earth.
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