But our hero had not to go far.  In his haste he almost tumbled over the tiger.  It was lying stone dead on the spot where it had fallen!

A few minutes more and the natives came pouring round him, wild with excitement and joy.  Soon he was joined by his own comrades.

“Well, you’ve managed to shoot him, I see,” said Van der Kemp as he joined the group.

“Alas! no.  I have not fired a shot,” said Nigel, with a half disappointed look.

“You’s got de better ob him anyhow,” remarked Moses as he pushed to the front.

“The spear got the better of him, Moses.”

“Veil now, zat is a splendid animal.  Lat me see,” said the professor, pulling out his tape-measure.

It was with difficulty that the man of science made and noted his measurements, for the people were pressing eagerly round the carcase to gratify their revenge by running their spears into the still warm body.  They dipped the points in the blood and passed their krisses broadside over the creature that they might absorb the courage and boldness which were supposed to emanate from it!  Then they skinned it, and pieces of the heart and brain were eaten raw by some of those whose relatives had been killed by tigers.  Finally the skull was hacked to pieces for the purpose of distributing the teeth, which are used by the natives as charms.

CHAPTER XXI.

IN WHICH THE PROFESSOR DISTINGUISHES HIMSELF.

Leaving this village immediately after the slaying of the tiger, the party continued to journey almost by forced marches, for not only was Nigel Roy very anxious to keep tryst with his father, and to settle the question of Kathleen’s identity by bringing father and daughter together, but Van der Kemp himself, strange to say, was filled with intense and unaccountable anxiety to get back to his island home.

“I don’t know how it is,” he said to Nigel as they walked side by side through the forest, followed by Moses and the professor, who had become very friendly on the strength of a certain amount of vacant curiosity displayed by the former in regard to scientific matters—­“I don’t know how it is, but I feel an unusually strong desire to get back to my cave.  I have often been absent from home for long periods at a time, but have never before experienced these strange longings.  I say strange, because there is no such thing as an effect without a cause.”

“May not the cause be presentiment?” suggested Nigel, who, knowing what a tremendous possibility for the hermit lay in the future, felt a little inclined to be superstitious.  It did not occur to him just then that an equally, if not more, tremendous possibility lay in the future for himself—­touching his recent discovery or suspicion!

“I do not believe in presentiments,” returned the hermit.  “They are probably the result of indigestion or a disordered intellect, from neither of which complaints do I suffer—­at least not consciously!”