A few of the panic-stricken mob had tried to climb the precipitous cliffs in vain.  One, however, getting his hands into a narrow, slanting crack, dragged himself up a few feet.

It was the Amban.  Frank drew his pistol; but Muriel clung to his arm and cried: 

“Oh, spare the poor wretch!”

Tashi had no scruples, but his magazine was empty and he searched in vain for a cartridge.

But Yuan Shi Hung’s time had come.  Badshah’s trunk shot out and caught the climber’s ankle.  The Chinaman was plucked from the face of the cliff and hurled to the ground.  A frenzied shriek burst from him as the tusk was driven into his shuddering body, which in an instant was trodden to a bloody pulp.  Muriel hid her face against her lover, but the agony of the wretch’s dying yell rang in her ears.

Not one of their enemies was left alive.  Then the elephants one by one slid and slithered down into the rushing water which was very little below the brink.  The mothers supported the youngest calves with their trunks, the less immature climbing on to their backs.  Tashi checked Badshah as he was about to follow the herd into the river and, lame as he was, slid down to the ground.  He searched the crushed and mangled corpses of his fellow-countrymen and collected their girdles until he had enough to knot and plait into two ropes, one to go about Badshah’s neck, the other around the great body.  More girdles sufficed to join these together and supply cords by which the men and the woman on his back could tie themselves on to the ropes and to each other securely.  When this was done Badshah slid into the river.  As elephants do he sank in the water until only the upper part of his head and the tip of his upraised trunk were above it.  Without the precaution that Tashi had taken his riders would have been instantly swept away.

Only elephants could have battled successfully with that raging torrent.  The upflung spray and leaping waves hid the herd from the fugitives as they clung desperately to the ropes and to each other.

* * * * *

Eighteen months had gone by.  In the garden of the Political Agent’s bungalow in Ranga Duar Colonel Dermot, completely restored to health, and his wife stood with his Assistant, Major Hunt and Macdonald.  They were watching Mrs. Wargrave who, with Brian and Eileen clinging to her, was holding out her two months’ old baby to a great elephant with a single tusk.  The animal raised its trunk as though in salute, then, lowering it, gently touched with its sensitive tip the laughing infant whose tiny hand instinctively clutched it and held it fast.

With a smile Muriel turned her head and looked at her husband.

“Badshah has accepted him.  Your son is free of the herd,” said Colonel Dermot.