“Look!  I see a wild elephant.  There’s another!  And another!” she whispered.

“Yes; I’ve come in search of them,” he replied in his ordinary tone.  “It’s Badshah’s herd.”

“Is it really?  How wonderful!  How did you know where to find them?” she cried, thrilled by the sight of the great beasts all round them and exclaiming with delight at the solemn little woolly babies, many newly born.  For this was the calving season.

Dermot uttered a peculiar cry that sent the cow-elephants huddling together, their young hiding under their bodies, while from every quarter the great tuskers broke out through the undergrowth and came to him in a mass.  Then, as Badshah turned and set off at a rapid pace, the bull-elephants followed.

When he arrived near the spot in which the man-eater was said to have his lair, Dermot stopped them all.  Despite her protests he tied Noreen firmly with the puggri to the rope crossing Badshah’s pad.  Then he drove his animal into the herd of tuskers, which had crowded together, and divided them into two bodies.  The tiger was reported to lie up in a narrow nullah filled and fringed with low bushes.  From the near bank to where Badshah stood the forest was free from undergrowth, which came to within a score of yards of the far bank.

Badshah smelled the ground, and the other elephants followed his example and, when they scented the tiger’s trail, began to be restless and excited.  A sharp cry from Dermot and the two bodies of tuskers separated and moved away, branching off half right and left, and disappeared in the undergrowth.

Dermot cocked his double-barrelled rifle.  There was a long pause.  A strange feeling of awe crept over Noreen at the realisation of her companion’s strange power over these great animals.  No wonder the superstitious natives believed him to be a god.

Presently there was a loud crashing in the undergrowth beyond the nullah, and Noreen saw the saplings in it agitated, as if by the passage of the elephants.  The tiger gave no sign of life.  The girl’s heart beat fast, and her breath came quickly.  But her companion never moved.

Suddenly Noreen gasped, for through the screen of thin bushes that fringed the edge of the nullah a hideous painted mask was thrust out.  It was a tiger’s face, the ears flattened to the skull, the eyes flaming, the lips drawn back to bare the teeth in a ghastly snarl.  The brute saw Badshah and drew quietly back.  A pause.  Then it sprang into full view and poised for a single instant on the far bank.  But at that very moment the line of tuskers burst out of the tangled undergrowth and the tiger jumped down into the nullah again.

Then like a flash it leaped into sight over the near bank, bounding in a furious charge straight at Badshah.  Noreen held her breath as it crouched to spring.  Dermot’s rifle was at his shoulder, and he pressed the trigger.  There was a click—­the cartridge had missed fire.  And the tiger sprang full at the man.