There was only one thing to believe.  The beaters had evidently heard him shoot, sought in vain for him in the thickets, possibly passed within a few hundred feet of him, and because he had been unconscious he had not heard them or called to them, and now they had given him up for lost.  He remembered with bitterness how all of them had been sure that an encounter with Nahara would cost him his life, and would thus be all the more quick to believe he had died in her talons.  Nahara had her mate and her own lameness to avenge, they had said, attributing in their superstition human emotions to the brute natures of animals.  It would have been quite useless for Warwick to attempt to tell them that the male tiger, in the mind of her wicked mate, was no longer even a memory, and that premeditated vengeance is an emotion almost unknown in the animal world.  Without leaders or encouragement, and terribly frightened by the scene they had beheld before the village, they had quickly given up any attempt to find his body.  There had been none among them coolheaded enough to reason out which trail he had likely taken, and thus look for him by the ford.  Likely they were already huddled in their thatched huts, waiting till daylight.

Then he called in the darkness.  A heavy body brushed through the creepers, and stepping falsely, broke a twig.  He thought at first that it might be one of the villagers, coming to look for him.  But at once the step was silenced.

Warwick had a disturbing thought that the creature that had broken the twig had not gone away, but was crouching down, in a curious manner, in the deep shadows.  Nahara had returned to her hunting.

IV

“Some time I, too, will be a hunter of tigers,” Little Shikara told his mother when the beaters began to circle through the bamboos.  “To carry a gun beside Warwick Sahib—­and to be honoured in the circle under the tree!”

But his mother hardly listened.  She was quivering with fright.  She had seen the last part of the drama in front of the village; and she was too frightened even to notice the curious imperturbability of her little son.  But there was no orderly retreat after Little Shikara had heard the two reports of the rifle.  At first there were only the shouts of the beaters, singularly high-pitched, much running back and forth in the shadows, and then a pell-mell scurry to the shelter of the villages.

For a few minutes there was wild excitement at the village gates.  Warwick Sahib was dead, they said—­they had heard the shots and run to the place of firing, and beat up and down through the bamboos; and Warwick Sahib had surely been killed and carried off by the tigress.  This dreadful story told, most of the villagers went to hide at once in their huts; only a little circle of the bravest men hovered at the gate.  They watched with drawn faces the growing darkness.