live there now."

"Thereafter I worked up-stream very slowly and lazily, and a little
above Monghyr there came down a boatful of white-faces--alive! They
were, as I remember, women, lying under a cloth spread over sticks, and
crying aloud. There was never a gun fired at us, the watchers of the
fords in those days. All the guns were busy elsewhere. We could hear
them day and night inland, coming and going as the wind shifted. I rose
up full before the boat, because I had never seen white-faces alive,
though I knew them well--otherwise. A naked white child kneeled by the
side of the boat, and, stooping over, must needs try to trail his hands
in the river. It is a pretty thing to see how a child loves running
water. I had fed that day, but there was yet a little unfilled space
within me. Still, it was for sport and not for food that I rose at the
child's hands. They were so clear a mark that I did not even look when I
closed; but they were so small that though my jaws rang true--I am sure
of that--the child drew them up swiftly, unhurt. They must have passed
between tooth and tooth--those small white hands. I should have caught
him cross-wise at the elbows; but, as I said, it was only for sport and
desire to see new things that I rose at all. They cried out one after
another in the boat, and presently I rose again to watch them. The boat
was too heavy to push over. They were only women, but he who trusts
a woman will walk on duckweed in a pool, as the saying is: and by the
Right and Left of Gunga, that is truth!"

"Once a woman gave me some dried skin from a fish," said the Jackal. "I
had hoped to get her baby, but horse-food is better than the kick of a
horse, as the saying is. What did thy woman do?"

"She fired at me with a short gun of a kind I have never seen before or
since. Five times, one after another" (the Mugger must have met with an
old-fashioned revolver); "and I stayed open-mouthed and gaping, my head
in the smoke. Never did I see such a thing. Five times, as swiftly as I
wave my tail--thus!"

The Jackal, who had been growing more and more interested in the story,
had just time to leap back as the huge tail swung by like a scythe.

"Not before the fifth shot," said the Mugger, as though he had never
dreamed of stunning one of his listeners--"not before the fifth shot
did I sink, and I rose in time to hear a boatman telling all those
white women that I was most certainly dead. One bullet had gone under
a