blazed
in those dead furnaces, no steam was coming from that rusty,
salt-incrusted funnel. It was as if the dead had spoken to warn the
living! He shivered once more, and staggered to the bridge-ladder,
holding on and listening.

Three, four, five times did the _Caronia's_ siren wail out into the
stillness. _No reply._ And then the throbbing pulses took up their
beat again.

Down in the corner of the main saloon, filled with chattering people,
romping children, and game-playing young folk, who knew not what had
passed on deck, sat the Silly Ass, the girl close to him.

"I'll never tell," she whispered. "What is it you're thinking of?"

The round eyes gazed into hers. "It's a long time since I did," he
said.

"Did what?"

"Prayed! God made me a fool just to do this some day, I guess." His
face showed the expression of a grown-up, sobered man.

On the bridge, the captain and the other officers were talking in low,
awe-struck tones.

[Illustration]

WAR ON THE TIGER

BY W. G. FITZ-GERALD

ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS AND FROM DRAWINGS BY FRANKLIN BOOTH

The _patwari_ salaamed and laid a report on my desk--a thing of maps
and figures that brought the sweat to my face. Fifty-seven killed, six
hundred square miles of rich rice and sugar country demoralized,
communications stopped, crops rotting on the ground, nine villages
abandoned, and the shyest of jungle creatures grazing in the
market-place! Tiger and tigress--a bad case.

When I told a man once that tigers and cobras, between them, made away
with 25,000 human beings in India every year, he thought I was joking.
"Why," said he, "surely one fifth of the human race--325,000,000, at
any rate--is packed into that triangle! Where can the tigers live?"
But I underestimated it; there were just 24,938 killed in 1906 by
tigers alone. You can see it yourself in the government records.

Now, as District Officer, I'm the "father" of two million souls, and
responsible for all things, from murder to measles. But this was
beyond me. It was a Commissioner's job, backed by the Maharaja.

The man-eaters, now propitiated as gods, had taken toll of my
villagers for two long years. The people were in abject terror, for
none knew the day, hour, or place of the monsters' next leap. Many
were already resigned to death. "It's written on our foreheads," they
said, with gentle misery. Poor devils! Think of the two hundred
millions of them in India oscillating b