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Updated: May 11, 2025
"Don't touch, old man!" And then, after the thief elephant, having no fight in him, was made fast, they heard Chakkra singing his song, but paid no attention. . . . It was a longer journey back to Hurda, for they came slowly, but there was no haste; and two, at least, in the hunting howdah could transcend passing time, each by the grace of the other.
The Bengali mahout, Chakkra, appeared; a sturdy little man with blue turban, red kummerband, and a scarf and tunic of white. The Deputy flicked away his cigarette and now spoke fast talk having to do with Nels, with the Hakima, with Gunpat Rao, who was his particular mahout's master, and of the strange elephant who had carried the two Sahibas away.
Chakkra reported at this point that he had seen this elephant in the market place, an old male with a woman's howdah, covering too few of his wrinkles and a mahout who would ruin the disposition of anything but a man-killer. Chakkra appeared to have an actual hatred toward this man, for he enquired of the Deputy: "Have I your permission to deal with the mahout of this thief elephant?"
The thing hardly believed and never seen in America that the elephant is speed-king of the world was revelation now! No pitch or roll; a long curving sweep this seeming scarcely to touch the ground. This was the going Skag had called for a night and a day. And Nels was labouring beside them now, but seeming to miss his tread seeming to run on ice. "Hai!" yelled Chakkra.
Skag fancied a gleam of deep massive humour under the tilt of the great ear below him, as the elephant, none too delicately, set his foot forward into the deeper part of the stream. His trunk and Chakkra's voice were raised together for Chakkra was slipping: "Hai, my Prince, would you go without me? Would you leave the Sahib alone in his proving-time?
The hint, however, was that the thief elephant would make all speed; that the lead of the four hours would be conserved as carefully as possible by the other mahout. "But he has a woman's howdah," Chakkra invariably added. "Two Sahibas, as well as the mahout himself. . . . To-morrow will tell hai, to-morrow will tell, if they go that far!"
In this hour he saw only hatred ahead and mockery, if Carlin . . . but the far dim peak of misty light held his aching eyes. "Go on, Nels on, old man," he would call. And Chakkra would turn with protest that could not find words his tongue silenced by the lean terrible face in the howdah behind him.
Presently Chakkra would fall to talking to his master, muttering in a kind of thrall at the thing he saw in the countenance of the American who had touched bottom. Sanford Hantee was facing the worst of the past and an impossible future, having neither hate nor pity, now.
The great head before him, with Chakkra's legs dangling behind the ears, had grasped something of the urge of their chase. A vast and mysterious mechanism was locked in the great grey skull. Actually Gunpat Rao seemed to laugh that he had shown the way to Nels. "You don't mean, Chakkra, that he goes into the silence like a holy man?" "It is like."
Skag had seen something of this in his India the yogi men shutting their eyes and bowing their heads and seeming to sink their consciousness into themselves, in order to ascertain some fact without and afar off. "Our lord gives his mind to the matter and the truth unfolds " Chakkra added. "Will the other elephant travel through the night so steadily?" "Not like this, Sahib," said Chakkra.
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