Part 171 (1/2)

”Hi! ho! Come back you!” shouted Chihun. ”Come back and put me on your neck, misborn mountain! Return, splendor of the hillsides! Adornment of all India, heave to, or I'll bang every toe off your forefoot!”

Moti Guj gurgled gently, but did not obey. Chihun ran after him with a rope and caught him up. Moti Guj put his ears forward, and Chihun knew what that meant, though he tried to carry it off with high words.

”None of your nonsense with me,” said he. ”To your pickets, devil-son!”

”Hrrump!” said Moti Guj, and that was all--that and the forebent ears.

Moti Guj put his hands in his pockets, chewed a branch for a toothpick, and strolled about the clearing, making fun of the other elephants who had just set to work.

Chihun reported the state of affairs to the planter, who came out with a dog-whip and cracked it furiously. Moti Guj paid the white man the compliment of charging him nearly a quarter of a mile across the clearing and ”Hrrumphing” him into his veranda. Then he stood outside the house, chuckling to himself and shaking all over with the fun of it, as an elephant will.

”We'll thrash him,” said the planter. ”He shall have the finest thras.h.i.+ng ever elephant received. Give Kala Nag and n.a.z.im twelve foot of chain apiece, and tell them to lay on twenty.”

Kala Nag--which means Black Snake--and n.a.z.im were two of the biggest elephants in the lines, and one of their duties was to administer the graver punishment, since no man can beat an elephant properly.

They took the whipping-chains and rattled them in their trunks as they sidled up to Moti Guj, meaning to hustle him between them. Moti Guj had never, in all his life of thirty-nine years, been whipped, and he did not intend to begin a new experience. So he waited, waving his head from right to left, and measuring the precise spot in Kala Nag's fat side where a blunt tusk could sink deepest. Kala Nag had no tusks; the chain was the badge of his authority; but for all that, he swung wide of Moti Guj at the last minute, and tried to appear as if he had brought the chain out for amus.e.m.e.nt. n.a.z.im turned round and went home early. He did not feel fighting fit that morning, and so Moti Guj was left standing alone with his ears c.o.c.ked.

That decided the planter to argue no more, and Moti Guj rolled back to his amateur inspection of the clearing. An elephant who will not work and is not tied up is about as manageable as an eighty-one-ton gun loose in a heavy seaway. He slapped old friends on the back and asked them if the stumps were coming away easily; he talked nonsense concerning labor and the inalienable rights of elephants to a long 'nooning'; and, wandering to and fro, he thoroughly demoralized the garden till sundown, when he returned to his picket for food.

”If you won't work, you sha'n't eat,” said Chihun, angrily. ”You're a wild elephant, and no educated animal at all. Go back to your jungle.”