Dermot briefly narrated his adventure with the rogue.  Brother and sister punctuated the tale with exclamations of surprise and admiration, and at the conclusion of it, turned to look at Badshah, who had taken refuge from the sun’s rays under a tree and was standing in the shade, shifting his weight from leg to leg, flapping his ears and driving away the flies by flicking his sides with a small branch which he held in his trunk.  Dermot had taken off his pad.

“You dear thing!” cried the girl to him.  “You are a hero.  I’m very proud to think that I have been on your back.”

“It was really wonderful,” said Daleham.  “How I should have liked to see the fight!  I say, all our servants have come out to look at him.  By Jove! any amount of coolies, too.  One would think that they’d never seen an elephant before.”

“I’m sure they’ve never seen such a splendid one,” said his sister enthusiastically.  “He is well worth looking at.  But—­oh, what is that man doing?”

One of the crowd of coolies that had collected had gone down on his knees before Badshah and touched the earth with his forehead.  Then another and another imitated him, until twenty or thirty of them were prostrate in the dust, worshipping him.

“I must stop this,” exclaimed Daleham.  “If old Parr sees them he’ll be furious.  They ought to be at their work.”

He ran down the steps of the verandah and ordered them away.  His servants disappeared promptly, but the coolies went slowly and reluctantly.

“What were they doing, Major Dermot?” asked Noreen.  “They looked as if they were praying to your elephant.  Hadn’t they ever seen one before?”

He explained the reason of the reverence paid to Badshah.  Daleham, returning, renewed his thanks as his sister went into the bungalow to see about breakfast.  When she returned to tell them that it was ready, Dermot hardly recognised in the dainty girl, clad in a cool muslin dress, the terrified and dishevelled damsel whom he had first seen standing in the midst of the elephants.

During the meal she questioned him eagerly about the jungle and the ways of the wild animals that inhabit it, and she and her brother listened with interest to his vivid descriptions.  A chance remark of Daleham’s on the difficulty of obtaining labour for the tea-gardens in the Terai interested Dermot and set him trying to extract information from his host.

“I suppose you know, sir, that as these districts are so sparsely populated and the Bhuttias on the hills won’t take the work, we have to import the thousands of coolies needed from Chota Nagpur and other places hundreds of miles away,” said Daleham.  “Lately, however, we have begun to get men from Bengal.”

“What?  Bengalis?” asked Dermot.

“Yes.  Very good men.  Quite decent class.  Some educated men among them.  Why, I discovered by chance that one is a B.A. of Calcutta University.”