Part 26 (2/2)

Nels had come in from the lateral and found that Gunpat Rao was right.

An amazing point to Skag, this. The great head before him, with Chakkra's legs dangling behind the ears, had grasped something of the urge of their chase. A vast and mysterious mechanism was locked in the great grey skull. Actually Gunpat Rao seemed to laugh that he had shown the way to Nels.

”You don't mean, Chakkra, that he goes into the silence like a holy man?”

”It is like.”

Skag had seen something of this in his India--the yogi men shutting their eyes and bowing their heads and seeming to sink their consciousness into themselves, in order to ascertain some fact _without_ and afar off.

”Our lord gives his mind to the matter and the truth unfolds--” Chakkra added.

”Will the other elephant travel through the night so steadily?”

(The sense of his own powerlessness was in him like a spear.)

”Not like this, Sahib,” said Chakkra.

The hint, however, was that the thief elephant would make all speed; that the lead of the four hours would be conserved as carefully as possible by the other mahout.

”But he has a woman's howdah,” Chakkra invariably added. ”Two Sahibas, as well as the mahout himself. . . . To-morrow will tell--hai, to-morrow will tell, if they go that far!”

That was always the point of the blackest fear--that the elephant ahead should come to some Mohammedan household, and leave Carlin where no one could pa.s.s the veil.

”But what of the messenger who brought word to the Sahibas?” Skag asked.

”He would slip away. Some hiding place for him--possibly back at Hurda.”

Chakkra seemed sure of this.

That was Skag's long night. He tried to think of the Kabuli as if he were an animal. A man might have a destroying enmity against a cobra or a tiger or a python; but it was not black and self-defiling like this thing which crept over him, out of the miasma of Deenah's tale.

In the dawn they reached a small river. Skag saw Nels lose his tread in the deepening centre, swing down with the current an instant and then strike his balance, swimming. Here was coolness and silence.

To-night he would know. To-night, if he did not have Carlin--

. . . Gunpat Rao stood shoulder-deep in the stream. Skag fancied a gleam of deep ma.s.sive humour under the tilt of the great ear below him, as the elephant, none too delicately, set his foot forward into the deeper part of the stream. His trunk and Chakkra's voice were raised together--for Chakkra was slipping:

”Hai, my Prince, would you go without me? Would you leave the Sahib alone in his proving-time? Would you leave my children fatherless? . . . There is none other--”

They stood in the lifting day overlooking a broad sloping country--the Vindha peaks faintly outlined in the far distance.

”It is the broad valley of Nerbudda,” Chakkra said, ”full of milk and wine against the seasons. One good day of travel ahead to the bank of Holy Nerbudda, Sahib, before the fall of night--if the chase holds so long.”

Skag did not eat this day. It was not until high noon that they halted by a spring of sweet water, and the American thought of his thirst.

Nels was leaner. He plunged to the water; then back to the scent again with a far challenge call. (It was like the echo of his challenge to the cheetah as the wall of the waters loomed across the hills, above Poona.) On he went, seriously; his mouth open in the great heat, his tongue rocking on its centre like nothing else.

Gunpat Rao seemed gradually overcoming obstructions; as if his great idea mounted and cleared, his body requiring time to strike its rhythm.

Chakkra sang to him. The sun became hotter and higher--until it hung at the very top of the universe and forgot nothing. There was a stillness in the hills that would frighten anything but a fever bird to silence. To Skag it was a weight against speech and he sat rigidly for many moments at a time--all his life of forest and city, of man and creature, pa.s.sing before his tortured eyes. . . . And the words Carlin had spoken; all the mysteries of his nights near Poona when she had seemed to draw near as he fell asleep--seemed to be there as he came forth from a dream. Always he had thought he could never forget the dreams--only to find them gone utterly, before he stood upon his feet.

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