t
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 shiny 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
[godling] 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