As the girl said good-bye to the planters she warmly thanked each one for his chivalrous readiness to come to her aid.  But to the soldier she found it hard, impossible, to say all that was in her heart, and to an onlooker her farewell to him would have seemed abrupt, almost cold.  But he understood her, and long after he had vanished from sight she seemed to feel the friendly pressure of his hand on hers.  When she went to her rooms the tears filled her eyes, as she kissed the fingers that his had held.

Out in the forest the Major led the way on Badshah, the ponies of his followers keeping at a respectful distance from the elephant.  When nearing the scene of the fight the tracks of the avenging herd were plain to see, and soon the party came upon ghastly evidences of the tragedy.  The buzzing of innumerable flies guided the searchers to spots in the undergrowth where the scattered corpses lay.  As each was reached a black cloud of blood-drunk winged insects rose in the air from the loathsome mass of red, crushed pulp, but trains of big ants came and went undisturbed.  The dense foliage had hidden the battered, shapeless bodies from the eyes of the soaring vultures high up in the blue sky, otherwise nothing but scattered bones would have remained.  Now the task of scavenging was left to the insects.

Over twenty corpses were found.  When an angry elephant has wreaked his rage on a man the result is something that is difficult to recognise as the remains of a human being.  So out of the twenty, the attackers shot by Dermot were the only ones whose bodies were in a fit state to be examined.  But they afforded no clue to the identity of the mysterious assailants.  The men appeared to have been low-caste Hindus of the coolie class.  They carried nothing on their persons except a little food—­a few broken chupatis, a handful of coarse grain, an onion or two, and a few cardamoms tied up in a bit of cloth.  Each had a powder-flask and a small bag with some spherical bullets in it hung on a string passed over one shoulder.  The weapons found were mostly old Tower muskets, the marks on which showed that at one time they had belonged to various native regiments in the service of the East India Company.  But there were two or three fairly modern rifles of French or German make.

These latter Dermot tied on his elephant, and, as there was nothing further to be learned here, he led the way to the other spot which he wished to visit.  But when, after a canter along the narrow, winding track through the dense undergrowth, jumping fallen trees and dodging overhanging branches, the party drew near the open glade in which Dermot had overtaken the raiders, a chorus of loud and angry squawks, the rushing sound of heavy wings and the rustling of feathered bodies prepared them for disappointment.  When they entered it there was nothing to be seen but two struggling groups of vultures jostling and fighting over what had been human bodies.  For the glade