Part 12 (1/2)

Keep silent, my children, and respect the aged.”

He turned stiffly, and shuffled to the top of the sand-bar, while the Jackal drew back with the Adjutant to the shelter of a tree stranded on the end nearest the railway bridge.

”That was a pleasant and profitable life,” he grinned, looking up inquiringly at the bird who towered above him. ”And not once, mark you, did he think fit to tell me where a morsel might have been left along the banks. Yet I have told _him_ a hundred times of good things wallowing down-stream. How true is the saying, 'All the world forgets the Jackal and the Barber when the news has been told!' Now he is going to sleep! _Arrh!_”

”How can a Jackal hunt with a Mugger?” said the Adjutant coolly. ”Big thief and little thief; it is easy to say who gets the pickings.”

The Jackal turned, whining impatiently, and was going to curl himself up under the tree trunk, when suddenly he cowered, and looked up through the draggled branches at the bridge almost above his head.

”What now?” said the Adjutant, opening his wings uneasily.

”Wait till we see. The wind blows from us to them, but they are not looking for us--those two men.”

”Men, is it? My office protects me. All India knows I am holy.” The Adjutant, being a first-cla.s.s scavenger, is allowed to go where he pleases, and so this one never flinched.

”I am not worth a blow from anything greater than an old shoe,” said the Jackal, and listened again. ”Hark to that footfall!” he went on.

”That was no country leather, but the shod foot of a white-face.

Listen again! Iron hits iron up there! It is a gun! Friend, those heavy-footed, foolish English are coming to speak with the Mugger.”

”Warn him, then. He was called Protector of the Poor by some one not unlike a starving Jackal but a little time ago.”

”Let my cousin protect his own hide. He has told me again and again there is nothing to fear from the white-faces. They must be white-faces. Not a villager of Mugger-Ghaut would dare to come after him. See, I said it was a gun! Now, with good luck, we shall feed before daylight. He cannot hear well out of water, and--this time it is not a woman!”

A s.h.i.+ny barrel glittered for a minute in the moonlight on the girders.

The Mugger was lying on the sand-bar as still as his own shadow, his fore feet spread out a little, his head dropped between them, snoring like a--mugger.

A voice on the bridge whispered: ”It's an odd shot--straight down almost--but as safe as houses. Better try behind the neck. Golly! what a brute! The villagers will be wild if he's shot, though. He's the _deota_ (G.o.dling) of these parts.”

”Don't care a rap,” another voice answered; ”he took about fifteen of my best coolies while the bridge was building, and it's time he was put a stop to. I've been after him in a boat for weeks. Stand by with the Martini as soon as I've given him both barrels of this.”

”Mind the kick, then. A double four-bore's no joke.”

”That's for him to decide. Here goes!”

There was a roar like the sound of a small cannon (the biggest sort of elephant-rifle is not very different from some artillery), and a double streak of flame, followed by the stinging crack of a Martini, whose long bullet makes nothing of a crocodile's plates. But the explosive bullets did the work. One of them struck just behind the Mugger's neck, a hand's breadth to the left of the backbone, while the other burst a little lower down, at the beginning of the tail. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred a mortally wounded crocodile can scramble to deep water and get away; but the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut was literally broken into three pieces. He hardly moved his head before the life went out of him, and he lay as flat as the Jackal.

”Thunder and lightning! Lightning and thunder!” said that miserable little beast. ”Has the thing that pulls the covered carts over the bridge tumbled at last?”

”It is no more than a gun,” said the Adjutant, though his very tail-feathers quivered. ”Nothing more than a gun. He is certainly dead. Here come the white-faces.”

The two Englishmen had hurried down from the bridge and across to the sand-bar, where they stood admiring the length of the Mugger. Then a native with an axe cut off the big head, and four men dragged it across the spit.

”The last time that I had my hand in a Mugger's mouth,” said one of the Englishmen, stooping down (he was the man who had built the bridge), ”it was when I was about five years old--coming down the river by boat to Monghyr. I was a Mutiny baby, as they call it. Poor mother was in the boat, too, and she often told me how she fired dad's old pistol at the beast's head.”