i Guj put his hands in his pockets, chewed a branch for a toothpick,
and strolled about the clearing, making fun of the other elephants who
had just set to work.

Chihun reported the state of affairs to the planter, who came out with a
dog-whip and cracked it furiously. Moti Guj paid the white man the
compliment of charging him nearly a quarter of a mile across the
clearing and "Hrrumphing" him into his veranda. Then he stood outside
the house, chuckling to himself and shaking all over with the fun of it
as an elephant will.

"We'll thrash him," said the planter. "He shall have the finest
thrashing ever elephant received. Give Kala Nag and Nazim twelve foot of
chain apiece, and tell them to lay on twenty."

Kala Nag--which means Black Snake--and Nazim were two of the biggest
elephants in the lines, and one of their duties was to administer the
graver punishment, since no man can beat an elephant properly.

They took the whipping-chains and rattled them in their trunks as they
sidled up to Moti Guj, meaning to hustle him between them. Moti Guj had
never, in all his life of thirty-nine years, been whipped, and he did
not intend to begin a new experience. So he waited, waving his head from
right to left, and measuring the precise spot in Kala Nag's fat side
where a blunt tusk could sink deepest. Kala Nag had no tusks; the chain
was the badge of his authority; but for all that, he swung wide of Moti
Guj at the last minute, and tried to appear as if he had brought the
chain out for amusement. Nazim turned round and went home early. He did
not feel fighting fit that morning and so Moti Guj was left, standing
alone with his ears cocked.

That decided the planter to argue no more, and Moti Guj rolled back to
his amateur inspection of the clearing. An elephant who will not work
and is not tied up is about as manageable as an eighty-one-ton gun loose
in a heavy seaway. He slapped old friends on the back and asked them if
the stumps were coming away easily; he talked nonsense concerning labor
and the inalienable rights of elephants to a long "nooning"; and,
wandering to and fro, he thoroughly demoralized the garden till sundown,
when he returned to his picket for food.

"If you won't work, you shan't eat," said Chihun, angrily. "You're a
wild elephant, and no educated animal at all. Go back to your jungle."

Chihun's little brown baby was rolling on the floor of the hut, and
stretching out its fat arms to the huge shadow in