“Then pull the trigger,” Warwick whispered.

The whole jungle world rocked and trembled from the violence of the report.

When the villagers, aroused by the roar of the rifle and led by Khusru and Puran and Little Shikara’s father, rushed down with their firebrands to the ford, their first thought was that they had come only to the presence of the dead.  Three human beings lay very still beside the stream, and fifty feet in the shadows something else, that obviously was not a human being, lay very still, too.  But they were not to have any such horror story to tell their wives.  Only one of the three by the ford, Singhai, the gun-bearer, was even really unconscious; Little Shikara, the rifle still held lovingly in his arms, had gone into a half-faint from fear and nervous exhaustion, and Warwick Sahib had merely closed his eyes to the darting light of the firebrands.  The only death that had occurred was that of Nahara the tigress—­and she had a neat hole bored completely through her neck.  To all evidence, she had never stirred after Little Shikara’s bullet had gone home.

After much confusion and shouting and falling over one another, and gazing at Little Shikara as if he were some new kind of a ghost, the villagers got a stretcher each for Singhai and the Protector of the Poor.  And when they got them well loaded into them, and Little Shikara had quite come to himself and was standing with some bewilderment in a circle of staring townspeople, a clear, commanding voice ordered that they all be silent.  Warwick Sahib was going to make what was the nearest approach to a speech that he had made since various of his friends had decoyed him to a dinner in London some years before.

The words that he said, the short vernacular words that have a way of coming straight to the point, established Little Shikara as a legend through all that corner of British India.  It was Little Shikara who had come alone through the jungle, said he; it was Little Shikara’s shining eyes that had gazed along the barrel, and it was his own brown finger that had pulled the trigger.  Thus, said Warwick, he would get the bounty that the British Government offered—­British rupees that to a child’s eyes would be past counting.  Thus in time, with Warwick’s influence, his would be a great voice through all of India.  For small as he was, and not yet grown, he was of the true breed.

After the shouting was done, Warwick turned to Little Shikara to see how he thought upon all these things.  “Thou shalt have training for the army, little one, where thy good nerve will be of use, and thou shalt be a native officer, along with the sons of princes.  I, myself, will see to it, for I do not hold my life so cheap that I will forget the thing that thou hast done to-night.”

And he meant what he said.  The villagers stood still when they saw his earnest face.  “And what, little hawk, wilt thou have more?” he asked.