ai, and his eyes were very heavy. "Kala Nag, my
lord, let us keep by Pudmini and go to Petersen Sahib's camp, or I shall
drop from thy neck."

The third elephant watched the two go away, snorted, wheeled round, and
took his own path. He may have belonged to some little native king's
establishment, fifty or sixty or a hundred miles away.

Two hours later, as Petersen Sahib was eating early breakfast, his
elephants, who had been double chained that night, began to trumpet, and
Pudmini, mired to the shoulders, with Kala Nag, very footsore, shambled
into the camp. Little Toomai's face was gray and pinched, and his
hair was full of leaves and drenched with dew, but he tried to salute
Petersen Sahib, and cried faintly: "The dance--the elephant dance! I
have seen it, and--I die!" As Kala Nag sat down, he slid off his neck in
a dead faint.

But, since native children have no nerves worth speaking of, in two
hours he was lying very contentedly in Petersen Sahib's hammock with
Petersen Sahib's shooting-coat under his head, and a glass of warm milk,
a little brandy, with a dash of quinine, inside of him, and while the
old hairy, scarred hunters of the jungles sat three deep before him,
looking at him as though he were a spirit, he told his tale in short
words, as a child will, and wound up with:

"Now, if I lie in one word, send men to see, and they will find that the
elephant folk have trampled down more room in their dance-room, and
they will find ten and ten, and many times ten, tracks leading to that
dance-room. They made more room with their feet. I have seen it. Kala
Nag took me, and I saw. Also Kala Nag is very leg-weary!"

Little Toomai lay back and slept all through the long afternoon and into
the twilight, and while he slept Petersen Sahib and Machua Appa followed
the track of the two elephants for fifteen miles across the hills.
Petersen Sahib had spent eighteen years in catching elephants, and he
had only once before found such a dance-place. Machua Appa had no need
to look twice at the clearing to see what had been done there, or to
scratch with his toe in the packed, rammed earth.

"The child speaks truth," said he. "All this was done last night, and
I have counted seventy tracks crossing the river. See, Sahib, where
Pudmini's leg-iron cut the bark of that tree! Yes; she was there too."

They looked at one another and up and down, and they wondered. For the
ways of elephants are beyond the wit of any man, blac