The Three Sapphires Part 26

"Sit you here, sahib, on this flat rock," he advised, "for here you face well the cave door, and if the evil brute makes a sudden rush you will have an advantage. As to the dogs, if it is a bhut they will not enter the cave, and if they do enter it will be because the spirit has gone."

"But, Mahadua, we saw him. How will he disappear through the rock walls of a cave?"

"As to the ways of a bhut not even the priest at my village of Gaum could say aught."

"Did you ever see a spirit, Mahadua?" Swinton queried, with the double purpose of whiling away the time as they waited and drawing from the man one of those eerie tales that originate with the half-wild forest dwellers.

"Sahib, I never saw my father, but there is no doubt that I had one; it was said that he died before I was born, and I believe it."

"Well, did you then know of one from people you believed in?"

"Yes, sahib. The priest of Gaum, which is my village, knew well the tiger that was named the 'One Who Looks Up.' You know, sahib, a tiger when he walks through the jungle never looks up at the trees, there being nothing there in the way of his food nor that he fears; though if he be shot at from a machan, after that, if he catches in his nostrils the taint of a sahib, he will remember, and will see such a trap."

"Tell me of the One Who Looks Up," Swinton begged.

"He was a man-killer, Sahib, and one day he killed a woodsman, but was disturbed before he had eaten the poor fellow, and went away, the man's bhut going with him. A Dep'ty Sahib had a machan put in a tree above the body, and sitting there in the moonlight he saw bagh creeping toward his victim; but before the Dep'ty Sahib could shoot the dead man's arm lifted up, and a finger pointed at the machan. Bagh looked up, and seeing the Dep'ty Sahib fled."

The shikari's voice suddenly dropped to a whisper, and without the move of a muscle he said: "Look at the cave mouth and you will see chita watching you. Move very slow and you may get a shot."

Swinton's gun was lying across his knee, and gently pulling back the hammers he slowly carried the stock toward his shoulder. As their eyes met, the leopard's lip curled in a snarl that bared his hooked fangs, and his ears flattened back, giving the head a cobra-like look. Inch by inch the gun crept upward, the unblinking eyes viewing this move with malevolent interest.

As the stock touched Swinton's shoulder he drooped his head to train his eye along the sights, for the shot must go true to the small brain beneath that sloping skull, or, stung by the wound, the leopard would charge and there would be no escape from a mauling; but his eye, travelling along the barrels, looked into the dark void of the cave. In a brief second the cunning beast had vanished.

"He will not return for some time, sahib; he knows what a gun is.

Perhaps even it is a spirit," the shikari said.

Dropping the gun to his knee Swinton asked: "What was the end of the One Who Looks Up?"

"The Dep'ty Sahib was a man of resource, and coming down he pegged to the ground both arms of the one whose bhut had gone with the tiger; then, as he waited in the machan, the tiger came back, thinking the sahib would have gone, and, as the dead man gave him no sign, crept close up, when the Dep'ty Sahib killed him."

"And you believe that story is true, Mahadua?"

"The guru says it is; but whether it is true or not matters only to the one who is devoured."

For some time Mahadua sat facing the cave, turning over in his mind a little business venture; then raising his head, he looked into Swinton's dead-blue eyes, only to turn away in blinking haste before their disconcerting inertia. He coughed, adjusted his little brown cap, and said: "Sahib, as to this one in the cave we shall know when the dogs come if it is a spirit; but if we had made an offering to the shrine, or even promised Safed Jan, who guards the mountain pa.s.s, a goat in sacrifice, all might have been well."

"It is too late now," Swinton suggested.

"If the sahib will bestow a silver rupee for the sacrifice of a goat to Safed Jan, Mahadua will make a ceremony over the gun and the bullet will not be turned by the spirit."

Swinton smiled at this wily touch while the man's master was away, but drawing forth a rupee he bestowed it upon the man who had capitalised a spirit. Very gravely Mahadua plucked a handful of gra.s.s, and, wrapping the coin in this, rubbed it along the barrels of Swinton's gun, tapped the locks with it, and then slipped the rupee into his jacket pocket, saying in a voice blithesome with relief--or cupidity: "If Safad Jan has observed, luck will follow."

Pariah-like yowls came up the pa.s.s, and Finnerty, with the herdsman and his brother holding in leash six dogs, appeared. The pack was a motley one, a canine kaleidoscope that, as it tumbled in the sunshine, showed all the various hues of ancestry from red Irish terrier to mizzled collie. One had a bulldog head and the lank, scraggy body of a village pariah; two had the powerfully boned frame of the Banjara hound; but all showed the uncertain, treacherous temper of their pariah cross.

Each dog was held by a rawhide leash fastened to a wide leather collar studded with iron spikes to prevent a leopard from taking his favourite jugular-severing jaw grip of the neck.

As he sat down for a minute's rest, the major said: "I fancy this may cost me a pretty penny for my friend, the herdsman, has made me agree to pay ten rupees for each dog killed, and five apiece for the mauled ones.

He was deuced curious over the night's work, but I told him we saw no one. He admitted that he didn't deliver the note to Lord Victor, saying he had lost it."

"Do you think by any chance he had an inkling Lord Victor was going there, and didn't want him to know we'd be there?"

"No. He says we saw no one because we spoiled the hunt by going like a marriage procession; that we went by the road, and that his brother, the watchman, saw Prince Ananda watching us, both going and coming."

"The sahib will have rested now, and the sun is hot," the Banjara interposed.

Finnerty, rising, placed the men; Swinton behind the flat boulder he had sat on, and from the top of which his gun would range the cave mouth; two convenient trees were allotted to Mahadua, the herdsman, and his brother when the dogs had been slipped. Finnerty would stand on some ground a little higher where he could rake the nala, both up and down, should the leopard bolt.

The dogs had been given a noseful of the leopard's trail, and, when they were slipped, with a chorus of yelps they made for the cave, while their owner slipped nimbly to his allotted tree. It was a tense moment; the Banjara, perched on the lower limb of a mhowa, was avariciously hoping the leopard would kill the whole pack, for at ten rupees a head they were better dead.

Mahadua's face grew grave as, instead of the tumult of a fierce battle, stillness held within the cavern; the eager yelps of the dogs as they had scrambled over lose stones to enter the cave had ceased. The leopard was, no doubt, a spirit, and had perhaps hushed the dogs. At any rate, a flesh-and-blood leopard would now be giving battle and voices of pain and pa.s.sion would be filling the cavern with cries.

Finnerty was muttering: "d.a.m.n if I can make it out; it's a rummy go!"

At that instant the pack came stringing out, and the leader stood looking wonderingly at the sahibs.

"They are afraid," Mahadua jeered; "they went in thinking it was a hare.

Oh, they are a true Banjara pack!"

The herdsman put a hand on a long knife in his belt, and with fury in his eyes said: "Will the Presence take a slipper to this monkey's mouth or shall I open its windpipe? The leopard is not within, for my dogs do not lie."

The pack was now running about in the silly, aimless manner of "gaze"

dogs where there is no quarry to see, and only a scent that is cold to their very dull nose-sense.

The shikari pointed this out, saying: "Keeper of mud cows, if the leopard had but just pa.s.sed out in the fear of your coming he would have left a fresh scent trail that even your dogs, who hunt but by the eye, would have found, and if the chita is not a spirit he is still within."

The Banjara drew his long, vicious knife, but as Finnerty grasped his arm he said, pointing in disdain at Mahadua: "This is a knife for game, not for cutting the throat of a chicken; I go into the cave to prove that of dog or shikari the shikari is the liar."

At this his brother also drew a knife, and, calling to the dogs, who sprang at his bidding to the cave, the two Banjaras followed at their heels.

"We might have a look; it's altogether mysterious," Finnerty said, turning to the captain.

The latter nodded. "I've got an idea; we'd better go in!"

They pa.s.sed into a long, narrow chamber--so long that it reached into deep gloom, with no end wall showing. They could see the dogs pa.s.s into the mysterious black shadow beyond and again reappear; always, going and coming, they sniffed at one spot. Here Finnerty struck a match, and Mahadua, dropping to his knees, examined the rock, saying: "The leopard rested here--there is blood."

Led by Finnerty, they followed the dogs along the corridor, coming upon a blank wall. There was no leopard; he had vanished as mystically as a spirit might have done. Finnerty lighted matches, but there were only the sullen walls on three sides.

"It is as I have said," the Banjara growled; "Mahadua, who has grown too old for the hunt, gave forth so much monkey chatter that the sahib saw not the leopard pa.s.s."

Mahadua lifted his cap. "See, hunter of cow tics, I take off my head-cover to thee as a great shikari. Sahib," he pleaded, "turn back this owner of mongrels, for I know where the chita will be found."

"Where?" Finnerty questioned.

"He will go up in the hills to the village of Kohima, where he was caught in a trap. It is said he killed many people near that village, for he was a man-eater."

"How far is Kohima?"

"It is six kos, or perhaps eight, and again it might be that it is ten by the road, but the chita will go through the jungle in a matter of half that distance."