The Three Sapphires Part 21

"Rather!" Lord Victor e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "To-night we'll drink a toast in fizz to the one-eared bull--a thoroughbred gentleman!"

"We'll need the elephant up to pad this tiger," Finnerty said. Mahadua, who was sent to bring on Raj Bahadar, had not been gone two minutes when from their back trail came, upwind, the shrill trumpeting of two elephants, and mingling with this was the harsh honk of a conch sh.e.l.l.

"That's Moti, or wild elephants tackling Raj Bahadar," Finnerty declared. "I must get back. The tiger will be all right here for a little--those dogs won't come back--and I'll send Mahadua and the elephant after him."

PART THREE

Chapter XIII

It was a stirring scene that greeted the three sahibs on their arrival at the conflict. Like a family of monkeys the natives decorated the tree, while below was Burra Moti giving l.u.s.ty battle to the tusker.

Either out of chivalry or cowardice, Raj Bahadar was backing up, refusing to obey the prod of his mahout's goad, and charge.

As Moti came at the bull like a battering-ram he received her on his forehead, the impact sounding like the crash of two meeting freight cars, and she, vindictively cunning, with a quick twist of her head, gashed him in the neck with a long tusk.

"Come down out of there, you women of the sweeper caste!" Finnerty commanded. The natives dropped to the ground. One of them, uncoiling his rawhide rope, darted in behind Moti, noosed a lifted foot, and ran back with the trailing end.

Raj Bahadar, discouraged by the thrust in his neck, wheeled and fled, pursued by Moti, the native la.s.sooer, clinging to the trailing noose, being whipped about like a wind-tossed leaf. With a shout Finnerty followed, the others joining in the chase.

A thick growth of timber checked Raj Bahadar, and, as Moti slackened her pace, the man with the rawhide darted around a tree with the rope; Finnerty and the others grasped the end, the rawhide creaked and stretched, and as Moti plunged forward her hind leg was suddenly yanked into the air, bringing her down. Another man sprang in to noose a foreleg, but Moti was too quick for him; she was up to stand for a little sullen meditation.

The native flashed in and out, almost within reach of her trunk, trying to make her raise a forefoot that he might noose it and slip his rawhide about a tree, when Moti, tethered fore and aft, would be helpless.

"Be careful!" Finnerty called as the noose man slipped in and flicked Moti on the knee with no result but the curling up of her trunk, as if out of harm's way. Again he danced in, and as the long trunk shot out like a snake darting from a coil he sprang beneath the big head, giving a laugh of derision; but Moti struck sidewise with a forefoot, and with a sickening crunch the man dropped ten feet away.

Uttering a squeal of rage, the elephant whipped about and charged back, the rawhide noose breaking like a piece of twine. Finnerty was fair in her path, but with a grunt, as if to say, "Get out of the way, friend,"

she brushed by him, and would have gone straight off to the jungle had not a man, in a sudden folly of fright, darted from behind a tree only to stumble and fall before he had taken a dozen steps. Down on her knees went Moti, seeking to spear the fallen man with her tusks, but at the first thrust one went either side of his body, and, being long, the great, crushing head did not quite reach him. Grasping both pillars of this ivory archway, the man wriggled out and escaped as Moti, pulling her tusks out of the soft earth, rose, c.o.c.ked her ears, drove a whistle of astonishment through her trunk, and then scuttled off to the jungle.

"We won't follow her up," Finnerty declared; "the noosing has fl.u.s.tered the old girl and we'll not get near her again to-day; she'd keep going if she heard us and we'd lose her forever up in the hills."

Mahadua advised: "If the mahout will tickle Bahadar with his hook so that he speak now and then, perhaps Moti, being lonesome and remembering of cakes and home, will come back like an angry woman who has found peace."

Thinking this a good plan, Finnerty gave the mahout orders to entice Moti in if she came about. A dozen men were sent to bring the tiger, slung from a pole, to the bungalow; they would bring back food to the others.

Telling the natives he would join them in the hunt next day, Finnerty and his companions mounted their horses to ride back.

Coming to the road that wound through the cool sal forest, they saw Prince Ananda riding toward them.

"What luck?" he greeted when they met. "I heard that an elephant had taken to the jungle." He wheeled his Arab with them, adding: "You look done up. Come along to the palace and have a cooling drink."

Lord Victor ranged his horse alongside Ananda's Arab as they started, but as they drew near the palace grounds Darpore halted his horse, and, pointing his hunting crop across the broad valley below in which lay the town, said: "Yonder was the road along which, so many centuries ago, Prince Sakya Singha's mother came when he was born here in the Lumbini Garden."

Swinton, in whose mind the prince was arraigned as a vicar of the devil--at least as a seditious prince which, to a British officer, was a.n.a.logous--felt the curious subtlety of this speech; for, sitting his beautiful Arab, outlined against the giant sal trees, their depths holding the mysteries of centuries, he had an Oriental background that made his pose compelling.

Lord Victor moved a little to one side, as if his volatile spirits felt a dampening, the depression of a buried past; and Prince Ananda, turning his Arab, drew Swinton along to his side by saying: "Have you come in contact with the cleavage of religious fanaticism in India, captain?"

"My experience was only of the army; there the matter of Hindu or Mussulman is now better understood and better arranged," Swinton answered cautiously as he and Ananda rode forward side by side.

The captain was puzzled. Training had increased the natural bent of his mind toward a suspicious receptivity where he felt there was necessity.

He had decided that the prince, with Oriental lethargy, never acted spontaneously--that there was something behind every move he made; his halt, back on the road, was evidently to make a change from Lord Victor to himself in their alignment. Temporarily the captain fancied that the prince might wish to draw from him some account of the preceding night's adventure. Indeed, as a Raj horse had probably been killed, Ananda could not have missed hearing of the accident.

It was Lord Victor's voice that stirred these thoughts to verbal existence. "I say, Prince Ananda," he suddenly asked, "did you hear that my mentor had been devoured by a tiger last night?"

As if startled into a remembrance, Ananda said: "Sorry, captain, I forgot to ask if anything did happen you last night. My master of horse reported this morning that your pony was found with a broken leg at the foot of a cliff; then I heard that you had gone off with the major, so knew you were all right. You see, well"--the prince spoke either in genuine or a.s.sumed diffidence--"as it was a Raj pony that came to grief I couldn't very well speak of it; that is, knowing that you were all right."

"When I heard it," Gilfain broke in, "remembering what you had said about the hunting leopard, I was deuced well bashed, I a.s.sure you."

"Was there--anything--in the report of--a tiger trying to maul you?" the prince asked, and Swinton, tilting his helmet, found the luminous black eyes reading his face.

But Swinton could have been plotting murder behind those "farthing eyes"

for all they betrayed as he answered: "I don't know what frightened the animal; he suddenly shied and I was thrown out, coming a cropper on my head which put me to sleep for a few minutes. When I came to the pony and cart had disappeared and there was nothing for it but go back to the major's bungalow for the night."

"Then there was nothing in the tiger story," the prince commented.

"I saw no tiger, anyway," Swinton declared, and Finnerty chuckled inwardly, for, like the captain, he had been mystified by Darpore's sudden interest in the latter.

The prince had presented something akin to a caste aloofness toward Swinton; now the change had tensed Finnerty's perceptions so that he took cognizance of things that ordinarily would have pa.s.sed as trivial.

He saw Ananda deliberately ride past the road that would have taken them to the magnificent courtyard entrance of the palace, the beautiful red rubble road that wound its way through crotons, oleanders, and hibiscus around the fairy Lake of the Golden Coin to cross the marble-arched bridge. Now they were following a road that led through the zoo to the back entrance. As they came to a ma.s.sive teakwood gate, from the left of which stretched away in a crescent sweep a wall of cages--the first one at the very gatepost holding a fiend, a man-killing black leopard--the major pressed his mount close to the rump of Swinton's horse, upon the right of whom rode Prince Ananda. A guard saluted, an attendant swung the teakwood barrier inward, and while it was still but half open Ananda pressed forward, his horse carrying Swinton's with him into a holocaust of lightning-like happenings.

Swinton turned toward the prince at some word, and at that instant the latter's horse swerved against his mount, as if stung by a spur on the outside; a black arm, its paw studded with glittering claws, flashed through the bars of the cage with a sweep like a scimitar's, striking Swinton full in the chest, the curved claws hooking through his khaki coat and sweeping him half out of the saddle toward the iron bars against which he would be ripped to pieces in a second. With an oath, Finnerty's whip came down on his horse's flank, and the Irishman's body was driven like a wedge between the leopard and his prey; the thrusting weight tore the claws through the cloth of Swinton's coat, and, still clutching viciously, they slashed Finnerty across the chest, a gash the width of his chin showing they had all but torn through his throat.

Swinton pulled himself into the saddle and looked back at the major's blood-smeared chin and on beyond to the sinister black creature that stood up on his hind legs against the bars of his cage thrusting a forepaw through playfully as though it were only a bit of feline sport.

He shuddered at the devilishness of the whole thing that looked so like another deliberate attempt. The prince would know that that black fiend, true to his jungle instincts, would be waiting in hiding behind the brick wall of his cage for a slash at any warm-blooded creature rounding the corner. They were a fighting pair, this black, murderous leopard and the prince. Finnerty was checking the blood flow on his chin with a handkerchief; his eyes, catching Swinton's as they turned from the leopard, were full of fierce anger.

There had been an outburst of grating calls and deep, reverberating roars as leopards and tigers, roused by the snarl of the black demon as he struck, gave vent to their pa.s.sion.

As if stirred to ungovernable anger by the danger his friends had incurred through the gateman's fault, Ananda turned on the frightened man, and, raising his whip, brought it down across his back. Twice the lash fell, and two welts rose in the smooth black skin; this a.s.sault accompanied by a torrent of abuse that covered chronologically the native's ancestry back to his original progenitor, a jungle pig.

Ananda's face, livid from this physical and mental a.s.sault, smoothed out with a look of contrite sorrow as he apologised to his companions.

"I'm awfully sorry, major; that fool nearly cost us a life by frightening my horse with his frantic efforts to open the gate. He's an opium eater, and must have been beating that leopard with his staff to have made him so suddenly vicious. Your coat is ripped, captain; are you wounded?"

"No, thanks!" Swinton answered dryly.

"You are, major."

"Nothing much--a scratch. I'll have to be careful over blood poisoning, that's all."

"Yes," the prince said, "I'll have my apothecary apply an antiseptic."

As they wound between a spurting fountain and a semicircle of iron-barred homes, a monkey dropped his black, spiderlike body from an iron ring in the ceiling, and, holding by a coil in the end of his tail, swung back and forth, head down, howling dismally. Bedlam broke forth in answer to this discordant wail.

"Delightful place!" Finnerty muttered as he rode at Swinton's elbow.