Little Toomai stared again and again.  The clearing, as he remembered it, had grown in the night.  More trees stood in the middle of it, but the undergrowth and the jungle grass at the sides had been rolled back.  Little Toomai stared once more.  Now he understood the trampling.  The elephants had stamped out more room—­had stamped the thick grass and juicy cane to trash, the trash into slivers, the slivers into tiny fibers, and the fibers into hard earth.

“Wah!” said Little Toomai, and his eyes were very heavy.  “Kala Nag, my lord, let us keep by Pudmini and go to Petersen Sahib’s camp, or I shall drop from thy neck.”

The third elephant watched the two go away, snorted, wheeled round, and took his own path.  He may have belonged to some little native king’s establishment, fifty or sixty or a hundred miles away.

Two hours later, as Petersen Sahib was eating early breakfast, his elephants, who had been double chained that night, began to trumpet, and Pudmini, mired to the shoulders, with Kala Nag, very footsore, shambled into the camp.  Little Toomai’s face was gray and pinched, and his hair was full of leaves and drenched with dew, but he tried to salute Petersen Sahib, and cried faintly:  “The dance—­the elephant dance!  I have seen it, and—­I die!” As Kala Nag sat down, he slid off his neck in a dead faint.

But, since native children have no nerves worth speaking of, in two hours he was lying very contentedly in Petersen Sahib’s hammock with Petersen Sahib’s shooting-coat under his head, and a glass of warm milk, a little brandy, with a dash of quinine, inside of him, and while the old hairy, scarred hunters of the jungles sat three deep before him, looking at him as though he were a spirit, he told his tale in short words, as a child will, and wound up with: 

“Now, if I lie in one word, send men to see, and they will find that the elephant folk have trampled down more room in their dance-room, and they will find ten and ten, and many times ten, tracks leading to that dance-room.  They made more room with their feet.  I have seen it.  Kala Nag took me, and I saw.  Also Kala Nag is very leg-weary!”

Little Toomai lay back and slept all through the long afternoon and into the twilight, and while he slept Petersen Sahib and Machua Appa followed the track of the two elephants for fifteen miles across the hills.  Petersen Sahib had spent eighteen years in catching elephants, and he had only once before found such a dance-place.  Machua Appa had no need to look twice at the clearing to see what had been done there, or to scratch with his toe in the packed, rammed earth.

“The child speaks truth,” said he.  “All this was done last night, and I have counted seventy tracks crossing the river.  See, Sahib, where Pudmini’s leg-iron cut the bark of that tree!  Yes; she was there too.”

They looked at one another and up and down, and they wondered.  For the ways of elephants are beyond the wit of any man, black or white, to fathom.