But Little Shikara did not want to think of rupees.  Even now, as sleep came to him, his childish spirit had left the circle of thatch roofs, and had gone on tremulous expeditions into the jungle.  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.

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.

II

One sunlit morning, perhaps a month after the skin of Nahar was brought in from the jungle, Warwick Sahib’s mail was late.  It was an unheard-of thing.  Always before, just as the clock struck eight, he would hear the cheerful tinkle of the postman’s bells.  At first he considered complaining; but as morning drew to early afternoon he began to believe that investigation would be the wiser course.

The postman’s route carried him along an old elephant trail through a patch of thick jungle beside one of the tributaries of the Manipur.  When natives went out to look, he was neither on the path nor drowned in the creek, nor yet in his thatched hut at the other end of his route.  The truth was that this particular postman’s bells would never be heard by human ears again.  And there was enough evidence in the wet mould of the trail to know what had occurred.

That night the circle under the tree was silent and shivering.  “Who is next?” they asked of one another.  The jungle night came down, breathless and mysterious, and now and then a twig was cracked by a heavy foot at the edge of the thickets.  In Warwick’s house, the great Protector of the Poor took his rifles from their cases and fitted them together.

“To-morrow,” he told Gunga Singhai, “we will settle for that postman’s death.”  Singhai breathed deeply, but said nothing.  Perhaps his dark eyes brightened.  The tiger-hunts were nearly as great a delight to him as they were to Warwick himself.

But while Nahara, lame from Warwick’s bullet, could no longer overtake cattle, she did with great skilfulness avoid the onrush of the beaters.  Again Little Shikara waited at the village gate for his hero to return; but the beaters walked silently to-night.  Nor were there any tales to be told under the tree.