He was in the mud-bath, grunting and bubbling with content.  It was a bath with just room enough for one.  And seeing that he was young, and perhaps failing to measure his size, obscured as it was in the mud, a great “rogue” bull came out of the jungles to take the bath for himself.

He was a huge creature—­wrinkled and yellow-tusked and scarred from the wounds of a thousand fights.  His little red eyes looked out malignantly, and he grunted all the insults the elephant tongue can compass to the youngster that lolled in the bath.  He confidently expected that Muztagh would yield at once, because as a rule young twenty-five-year-olds do not care to mix in battle with the scarred and crafty veterans of sixty years.  But he did not know Muztagh.

The latter had been enjoying the bath to the limit, and he had no desire whatever to give it up.  Something hot and raging seemed to explode in his brain and it was as if a red glare, such as sometimes comes in the sunset, had fallen over all the stretch of river and jungle before his eyes.  He squealed once, reared up with one lunge out of the bath—­and charged.  They met with a shock.

Of all the expressions of power in the animal world, the elephant fight is the most terrible to see.  It is as if two mountains rose up from their roots of strata and went to war.  It is terrible to hear, too.  The jungle had been still before.  The river glided softly, the wind was dead, the mid-afternoon silence was over the thickets.

The jungle people were asleep.  A thunder-storm would not have broken more quickly, or could not have created a wilder pandemonium.  The jungle seemed to shiver with the sound.

They squealed and bellowed and trumpeted and grunted and charged.  Their tusks clicked like the noise of a giant’s game of billiards.  The thickets cracked and broke beneath their great feet.

It lasted only a moment.  It was so easy, after all.  In a very few seconds indeed, the old rogue became aware that he had made a very dangerous and disagreeable mistake.  There were better mud-baths on the river, anyway.

He had not been able to land a single blow.  And his wrath gave way to startled amazement when Muztagh sent home his third.  The rogue did not wait for the fourth.

Muztagh chased him into the thickets.  But he was too proud to chase a beaten elephant for long.  He halted, trumpeting, and swung back to his mud-bath.

But he did not enter the mud again.  All at once he remembered the herd and the fights of his calfhood.  All at once he knew that his craft and strength and power were beyond that of any elephant in all the jungle.  Who was the great, arrogant herd-leader to stand against him?  What yellow tusks were to meet his and come away unbroken?

His little eyes grew ever more red as he stood rocking back and forth, his trunk lifted to catch the sounds and smells of the distant jungle.  Why should he abide alone, when he could be the ruler of the herd and the jungle king?  Then he grunted softly and started away down the river.  Far away, beyond the mountains and rivers and the villages of the hillfolk, the herd of his youth roamed in joyous freedom.  He would find them and assert his mastery.