Warwick knew tigers, and he had kept the rifle always ready for just such a need as this.  The distance was nearly five hundred yards, and the bullet went wide of its mark.  Nevertheless, it saved the native’s life.  The great cat remembered this same far-off explosion from another day, in a dry creek-bed of months before, and the sing of the bullet was a remembered thing, too.  Although it would speedily return to her, her courage fled and she turned and faced into the bamboos.

In an instant, Warwick was on his great veranda, calling his beaters.  Gunga Singhai, his faithful gun-carrier, slipped shells into the magazine of his master’s high-calibered close-range tiger-rifle.  “The elephant, Sahib?” he asked swiftly.

“Nay, this will be on foot.  Make the beaters circle about the fringe of bamboos.  Thou and I will cross the eastern fields and shoot at her as she breaks through.”

But there was really no time to plan a complete campaign.  Even now, the first gray of twilight was blurring the sharp outlines of the jungle, and the soft jungle night was hovering, ready to descend.  Warwick’s plan was to cut through to a certain little creek that flowed into the river and with Singhai to continue on to the edge of the bamboos that overlooked a wide field.  The beaters would prevent the tigress from turning back beyond the village, and it was at least possible that he would get a shot at her as she burst from the jungle and crossed the field to the heavier thickets beyond.

“Warwick Sahib walks into the teeth of his enemy,” Khusru, the hunter, told a little group that watched from the village gate.  “Nahara will collect her debts.”

A little brown boy shivered at his words and wondered if the beaters would turn and kick him, as they had always done before, if he should attempt to follow them.  It was the tiger-hunt, in view of his own village, and he sat down, tremulous with rapture, in the grass to watch.  It was almost as if his dream—­that he himself should be a hunter of tigers—­was coming true.  He wondered why the beaters seemed to move so slowly and with so little heart.

He would have known if he could have looked into their eyes.  Each black pupil was framed with white.  Human hearts grow shaken and bloodless from such sights as this they had just seen, and only the heart of a jungle creature—­the heart of the eagle that the jungle gods, by some unheard-of fortune, had put in the breast of Little Shikara—­could prevail against them.  Besides, the superstitious Burmans thought that Warwick was walking straight to death—­that the time had come for Nahara to collect her debts.

III

Warwick Sahib and Singhai disappeared at once into the fringe of jungle, and silence immediately fell upon them.  The cries of the beaters at once seemed curiously dim.  It was as if no sound could live in the great silences under the arching trees.  Soon it was as if they were alone.