out thee now," Warwick told him.

And thus Little Shikara's dreams came true--to be known through many
villages as a hunter of tigers, and a brave follower and comrade of
the forest trails. And thus he came into his own--in those far-off
glades of Burma, in the jungles of the Manipur.

THE MAN WHO CURSED THE LILIES

By CHARLES TENNEY JACKSON

From _Short Stories_

Tedge looked from the pilot-house at the sweating deckhand who stood
on the stubby bow of the _Marie Louise_ heaving vainly on the pole
thrust into the barrier of crushed water hyacinths across the channel.

Crump, the engineer, shot a sullen look at the master ere he turned
back to the crude oil motor whose mad pounding rattled the old bayou
stern-wheeler from keel to hogchains.

"She's full ahead now!" grunted Crump. And then, with a covert glance
at the single passenger sitting on the fore-deck cattle pens, the
engineman repeated his warning, "Yeh'll lose the cows, Tedge, if you
keep on fightin' the flowers. They're bad f'r feed and water--they
can't stand another day o' sun!"

Tedge knew it. But he continued to shake his hairy fist at the
deckhand and roar his anathemas upon the flower-choked bayou. He knew
his crew was grinning evilly, for they remembered Bill Tedge's
year-long feud with the lilies. Crump had bluntly told the skipper he
was a fool for trying to push up this little-frequented bayou from
Cote Blanche Bay to the higher land of the west Louisiana coast, where
he had planned to unload his cattle.

Tedge had bought the cargo himself near Beaumont from a beggared
ranchman whose stock had to go on the market because, for seven
months, there had been no rain in eastern Texas, and the short-grass
range was gone.

Tedge knew where there was feed for the starving animals, and the
_Marie Louise_ was coming back light. By the Intercoastal Canal and
the shallow string of bays along the Texas-Louisiana line, the bayou
boat could crawl safely back to the grassy swamp lands that fringe the
sugar plantations of Bayou Teche. Tedge had bought his living cargo so
ridiculously cheap that if half of them stood the journey he would
profit. And they would cost him nothing for winter ranging up in the
swamp lands. In the spring he would round up what steers had lived and
sell them, grass-fat, in New Orleans. He'd land them there with his
flap-paddle bayou boat, too, for the _Marie Louise_ ranged up and down
the Inter-coastal Canal and the unchart