“By-the-bye, Griggs,” he called out through the canvas, “I forgot to tell you.  They are bringing that beast home on an elephant.  It was much nearer than we supposed.  They will be here in twenty minutes.”  A tremendous splashing interrupted him.  “You can go and attend to that funeral you were talking about last night,” he added, and his voice was again drowned in the swish and souse of the water.  “He was rather large—­over ten feet—­I should say.  Measure him as soon as he—­” another cascade completed the sentence.  I went out, taking the measuring tape from the table.

In a few minutes the procession appeared.  Two or three matutinal shikarries had gone out and come back, followed by the elephant, for which Isaacs had sent the ryot at full speed the moment he was sure the beast was dead.  And so they came up the little hill behind the dining-tent.  The great tusker moved evenly along, bearing on the pad an enormous yellow carcass, at which the little mahout glanced occasionally over his shoulder.  Astride of the dead king sat the ryot, who had directed Isaacs, crooning a strange psalm of victory in his outlandish northern dialect, and occasionally clapping his hands over his head with an expression of the most intense satisfaction I have ever seen on a human face.  The little band came to the middle of the camp where the other tigers, now cut up and skinned elsewhere, had been deposited the night before, and as the elephant knelt down, the shikarries pulled the whole load over, pad, tiger, ryot and all, the latter skipping nimbly aside.  There he lay, the great beast that had taken so many lives.  We stretched him out and measured him—­eleven feet from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail, all but an inch—­as a little more straightening fills the measure, eleven feet exactly.

Meanwhile, the servant and shikarries collected, and the noise of the exploit went abroad.  The sun was just rising when Mr. Ghyrkins put his head out of his tent and wanted to know “what the deuce all this tamaesha was about.”

“Oh, nothing especial,” I called out.  “Isaacs has killed an eleven foot man-eater in the night.  That is all.”

“Well I’m damned,” said Mr. Ghyrkins briefly, and to the point, as he stared from his tent at the great carcass, which lay stretched out for all to see, the elephant having departed.

“Clear off those fellows and let me have a look at him, can’t you?” he called out, gathering the tent curtains round his neck; and there he stood, his jolly red face and dishevelled gray hair looking as if they had no body attached at all.

I went back to our quarters.  Isaacs was putting the ears, which he had carefully cleansed from blood, into a silver box of beautiful workmanship, which Narain had extracted from his master’s numerous traps.

“Take that box to Miss Westonhaugh’s tent,” he said, giving it to the servant, “with a greeting from me—­with ‘much peace.’” The man went out.