‘Keep count!’ shouted Mowgli, scornfully.  ’It may be that I have stolen one of them.  Keep count, for I will do your herding no more.  Fare you well, children of men, and thank Messua that I do not come in with my wolves and hunt you up and down your street.’

He turned on his heel and walked away with the Lone Wolf; and as he looked up at the stars he felt happy.  ’No more sleeping in traps for me, Akela.  Let us get Shere Khan’s skin and go away.  No; we will not hurt the village, for Messua was kind to me.’

When the moon rose over the plain, making it look all milky, the horrified villagers saw Mowgli, with two wolves at his heels and a bundle on his head, trotting across at the steady wolf’s trot that eats up the long miles like fire.  Then they banged the temple bells and blew the conches louder than ever; and Messua cried, and Buldeo embroidered the story of his adventures in the jungle, till he ended by saying that Akela stood up on his hind legs and talked like a man.

The moon was just going down when Mowgli and the two wolves came to the hill of the Council Rock, and they stopped at Mother Wolf’s cave.

‘They have cast me out from the man Pack, Mother,’ shouted Mowgli, ‘but I come with the hide of Shere Khan to keep my word.’  Mother Wolf walked stiffly from the cave with the cubs behind her, and her eyes glowed as she saw the skin.

’I told him on that day, when he crammed his head and shoulders into this cave, hunting for thy life, little frog—­I told him that the hunter would be the hunted.  It is well done.’

‘Little Brother, it is well done,’ said a deep voice in the thicket.  ‘We were lonely in the jungle without thee,’ and Bagheera came running to Mowgli’s bare feet.  They clambered up the Council Rock together, and Mowgli spread the skin out on the flat stone where Akela used to sit, and pegged it down with four slivers of bamboo, and Akela lay down upon it, and called the old call to the Council, ‘Look, look well, O Wolves,’ exactly as he had called when Mowgli was first brought there.

Ever since Akela had been deposed, the Pack had been without a leader, hunting and fighting at their own pleasure.  But they answered the call from habit; and some of them were lame from the traps they had fallen into, and some limped from shot-wounds, and some were mangy from eating bad food, and many were missing; but they came to the Council Rock, all that were left of them, and saw Shere Khan’s striped hide on the rock, and the huge claws dangling at the end of the empty dangling feet.

‘Look well, O Wolves.  Have I kept my word?’ said Mowgli; and the wolves bayed Yes, and one tattered wolf howled:—­

’Lead us again, O Akela.  Lead us again, O man-cub, for we be sick of this lawlessness, and we would be the Free People once more.’

‘Nay,’ purred Bagheera, ’that may not be.  When ye are full fed, the madness may come upon you again.  Not for nothing are ye called the Free People.  Ye fought for freedom, and it is yours.  Eat it, O Wolves.’