There was not even the symptom of a smile on Cunningham’s face.  He looked straight into Mahommed Gunga’s eyes, and spoke as one man talking calm common sense to another.  He raised his hand as the Rajput began to stammer an apology.

“No.  Don’t apologize.  If you’ll forgive me for shooting your pet tiger, I’ll overlook the rest of it.  If I’d known that you kept him in there o’ nights, I’d have chosen another room, that’s all—­some room where I couldn’t smell him, and where I shouldn’t run the risk of killing an inoffensive man.  Why, I might have shot you!  Think how sorry I’d have been!”

The Risaldar did not quite know what to say; so, wiser than most, he said nothing.

“Oh, and one other matter.  I don’t speak much of the language yet, so, would you mind translating to my servant that the next time he goes sick without giving me notice, and without putting oil in my lamp, I’ll have him fed to the tiger before he’s brought into my room?  Just tell him that quietly, will you?  Say it slowly so that it sinks in.  Thanks.”

Straight-faced as Cunningham himself, the Risaldar tongue-lashed the servant with harsh, tooth-rasping words that brought him up to attention.  Whether he interpreted or not the exact meaning of what Cunningham had said, he at least produced the desired effect; the servant mumbled apologetic nothings and slunk off the veranda backward —­to go away and hold his sides with laughter at the back of the dak-bungalow.  There Mahommed Gunga found him afterward and administered a thrashing—­not, as he was careful to explain, for disobedience, but for having dared to be amused at the Risaldar’s discomfiture.

But there was still one point that weighed heavily on Mahommed Gunga’s mind as the servant shuffled off and left him alone face to face with Cunningham.  There is as a very general rule not more than one man-eating tiger in a neighborhood, and not even the greenest specimen of subaltern new brought from home would be likely to mistake one for the other kind.  The man-eater was dead, and there was an engagement to shoot one that very morning.  He hesitated—­said nothing for the moment—­and wondered whether his best course would be to go ahead and pretend to beat out the jungle and tell some lie or other about the tiger having got away.  But Ralph Cunningham, with serious gray eyes fixed full on his, saved him the trouble of deciding.

“If it’s all one to you, Mahommed Gunga,” he said, the corner of his mouth just flickering, “we’ll move on from here at once.  This is a beastly old bungalow to sleep in, and shooting tigers don’t seem so terribly exciting to me.  Besides, the climate here must be rotten for the horses.”

“As you wish, sahib.”

“Very well—­if the choice rests with me, I wish it.  It might—­ah —­save the villagers a lot of hard work beating through the jungle, mightn’t it—­besides, there’ll be other tigers on the road.”