instant to a camp of Robin Hood's
foresters. Then they brought up the dead from behind bushes and under
rocks--among others a twenty-seven-inch brute who bore on his flank (all
pigs shot in a beat are _ex-officio_ boars) a hideous, half-healed scar,
big as a man's hand, of a bullet wound. Express bullets are ghastly
things in their effects, for, as the _shikari_ is never tired of
demonstrating, they knock the inside of animals into pulp.

The second beat, of the reverse side of the hill, had barely begun when
the panther returned--uneasily as if something were keeping her
back--much lower down the hill. Then the face of the Rawat of Amet
changed, as he brought his gun up to his shoulder. Looking at him as he
fired, one forgot all about the Mayo College at which he had been
educated, and remembered only some trivial and out-of-date affairs, in
which his forefathers had been concerned, when a bridegroom, with his
bride at his side, charged down the slope of the Chitor road and died
among Akbar's men. There are stories connected with the House of Amet,
which are told in Mewar to-day. The young man's face, for as short a
time as it takes to pull trigger and see where the bullet falls, was a
white light upon all these tales.

Then the mask shut down, as he clicked out the cartridge, and, very
sweetly, gave it as his opinion that some other gun, not his own, had
bagged the panther who lay shot through the spine, feebly trying to drag
herself downhill into cover. It is an awful thing to see a big beast
die, when the soul is wrenched out of the struggling body in ten
seconds. Wild horses shall not make the Englishman disclose the exact
number of shots that were fired. It is enough to say that four
Englishmen, now scattered to the four winds of heaven, are each morally
certain that he and he alone shot that panther. In time, when distance
and the mirage of the sands of Uodhpur shall have softened the harsh
outlines of truth, the Englishman who did _not_ fire a shot will come to
believe that he was the real slayer, and will carefully elaborate that
lie.

A few minutes after the murder, a two-year-old cub came trotting along
the hillside, and was bowled over by a very pretty shot behind the left
ear and through the palate. Then the beaters' lances showed through the
bushes, and the guns began to realise that they had allowed to escape,
or had driven back by their fire, a multitude of pig.

This ended the beat, and the processi