‘We’ll thrash him,’ said the planter.  ’He shall have the finest thrashing that ever elephant received.  Give Kala Nag and Nazim twelve foot of chain apiece, and tell them to lay on twenty blows.’

Kala Nag—­which means Black Snake—­and Nazim were two of the biggest elephants in the lines, and one of their duties was to administer the graver punishments, since no man can beat an elephant properly.

They took the whipping-chains and rattled them in their trunks as they sidled up to Moti Guj, meaning to hustle him between them.  Moti Guj had never, in all his life of thirty-nine years, been whipped, and he did not intend to open new experiences.  So he waited, weaving his head from right to left, and measuring the precise spot in Kala Nag’s fat side where a blunt tusk would sink deepest.  Kala Nag had no tusks; the chain was his badge of authority; but he judged it good to swing wide of Moti Guj at the last minute, and seem to appear as if he had brought out the chain for amusement.  Nazim turned round and went home early.  He did not feel fighting-fit that morning, and so Moti Guj was left standing alone with his ears cocked.

That decided the planter to argue no more, and Moti Guj rolled back to his inspection of the clearing.  An elephant who will not work, and is not tied up, is not quite so manageable as an eighty-one ton gun loose in a heavy sea-way.  He slapped old friends on the back and asked them if the stumps were coming away easily; he talked nonsense concerning labour and the inalienable rights of elephants to a long ‘nooning’; and, wandering to and fro, thoroughly demoralized the garden till sundown, when he returned to his pickets for food.

‘If you won’t work you shan’t eat,’ said Chihun angrily.  ’You’re a wild elephant, and no educated animal at all.  Go back to your jungle.’

Chihun’s little brown baby, rolling on the floor of the hut, stretched its fat arms to the huge shadow in the doorway.  Moti Guj knew well that it was the dearest thing on earth to Chihun.  He swung out his trunk with a fascinating crook at the end, and the brown baby threw itself shouting upon it.  Moti Guj made fast and pulled up till the brown baby was crowing in the air twelve feet above his father’s head.

‘Great Chief!’ said Chihun.  ’Flour cakes of the best, twelve in number, two feet across, and soaked in rum shall be yours on the instant, and two hundred pounds’ weight of fresh-cut young sugar-cane therewith.  Deign only to put down safely that insignificant brat who is my heart and my life to me.’

Moti Guj tucked the brown baby comfortably between his forefeet, that could have knocked into toothpicks all Chihun’s hut, and waited for his food.  He ate it, and the brown baby crawled away.  Moti Guj dozed, and thought of Deesa.  One of many mysteries connected with the elephant is that his huge body needs less sleep than anything else that lives.  Four or five hours in the night suffice—­two just before midnight, lying down on one side; two just after one o’clock, lying down on the other.  The rest of the silent hours are filled with eating and fidgeting and long grumbling soliloquies.