Soon a villager who had been working in Warwick’s fields came trotting in Oriental fashion across the meadow.  His eyes were only human, and he did not see the tawny shape in the tall grass.  If any one had told him that a full-grown tigress could have crept to such a place and still remained invisible, he would have laughed.  He was going to his thatched hut, to brown wife and babies, and it was no wonder that he trotted swiftly.  The muscles of the great cat bunched, and now the whipping tail began to have a little vertical motion that is the final warning of a spring.

The man was already in leaping range; but the tiger had learned, in many experiences, always to make sure.  Still she crouched—­a single instant in which the trotting native came two paces nearer.  Then the man drew up with a gasp of fright.

For just as the clear outlines of an object that has long been concealed in a maze of light and shadow will often leap, with sudden vividness, to the eyes, the native suddenly perceived the tiger.

He caught the whole dread picture—­the crouching form, the terrible blue lights of the eyes, the whipping tail.  The gasp he uttered from his closing throat seemed to act like the fall of a firing-pin against a shell on the bunched muscles of the animal; and she left her covert in a streak of tawny light.

But Nahara’s leaps had never been quite accurate since she had been wounded by Warwick’s bullet, months before.  They were usually straight enough for the general purposes of hunting, but they missed by a long way the “theoretical centre of impact” of which artillery officers speak.  Her lame paw always seemed to disturb her balance.  By remembering it, she could usually partly overcome the disadvantage; but to-day, in the madness of her hunger, she had been unable to remember anything except the terrible rapture of killing.  This circumstance alone, however, would not have saved the native’s life.  Even though her fangs missed his throat, the power of the blow and her rending talons would have certainly snatched away his life as a storm snatches a leaf.  But there was one other determining factor.  The Burman had seen the tiger just before she leaped; and although there had been no time for conscious thought, his guardian reflexes had flung him to one side in a single frenzied effort to miss the full force of the spring.

The result of both these things was that he received only an awkward, sprawling blow from the animal’s shoulder.  Of course he was hurled to the ground; for no human body in the world is built to withstand the ton or so of shocking power of a three-hundred-pound cat leaping through the air.  The tigress sprawled down also, and because she lighted on her wounded paw, she squealed with pain.  It was possibly three seconds before she had forgotten the stabbing pain in her paw and had gathered herself to spring on the unconscious form of the native.  And that three seconds gave Warwick Sahib, sitting at the window of his study, an opportunity to seize his rifle and fire.