Daylight found them on the banks of a broad, swift-flowing river in a valley between the range of mountains through which they had passed and a line of still more formidable and snow-clad peaks.  The elephants swam the wide and rushing water, for of all land animals their kind are the best swimmers.  The tiniest babies were supported by the trunks of their mothers, on to whose backs older calves climbed and were thus carried across.  Without stopping the herd plunged into the awful passes of the next range, of which they were not clear until the evening of the following day.  Then they halted in dense forest.

Next morning Dermot took from the pockets of Badshah’s pad the dresses and other things that they needed for their disguises, and instead of replacing the pad concealed it carefully.  Then he said: 

“We’ll leave our escort here, Wargrave, and carry on by ourselves; for we are not far from inhabited and cultivated country, and indeed fairly near the Jong (castle) of our enemy the Penlop of Tuna.”

The wild elephants were feeding all around, paying no heed to them.  The Colonel turned to Badshah and pointing to the ground said one word: 

“Raho! (Remain!)”

Then he continued to Wargrave: 

“We’ll find them, or they’ll find us, whenever we return.”

An hour later two elderly lamas in soiled yellow robes and horn-rimmed spectacles, followed by a lame coolie carrying their scanty possessions, emerged, rosary and praying-wheel in hand, from the forest into the cultivated country.

For some weeks they wandered unsuspected through the Tuna Penlop’s dominions and even penetrated into his own jong, where they were entertained and their prayers solicited by his cut-throat retainers.  They learned enough to realise that the Amban was endeavouring by the free supply of arms and military instructors to form here the nucleus of a trained force to be employed eventually against India, backed up by reinforcements of Chinese troops and contingents from other parts of Bhutan.

Their investigations completed they returned safely to the forest in which they had left the herd; and, much to Wargrave’s relief, they had not been many hours camped on the spot where they had parted with them when Badshah and his wild companions appeared.  The spies returned to India as they had come, unseen and unsuspected.

This excursion was but the first of many that Wargrave made with the Colonel and the herd; and he soon began to know almost every member of it and make friends, not only with the solemn but friendly little calves, but even with their less trusting mothers.  He was now thoroughly at home in the jungle and no longer needed a tutor in sport.  His one room in the Mess began to be overcrowded with trophies of his skill with the rifle.  Other tiger-skins had joined the first; and, although he had not secured a second bison, several good heads of sambhur, khakur and cheetul, or spotted deer, hung on his whitewashed stone walls.