ary tone. "It's
Badshah's herd."

"Is it really? How wonderful! How did you know where to find them?" she
cried, thrilled by the sight of the great beasts all round them and
exclaiming with delight at the solemn little woolly babies, many newly
born. For this was the calving season.

Dermot uttered a peculiar cry that sent the cow-elephants huddling
together, their young hiding under their bodies, while from every
quarter the great tuskers broke out through the undergrowth and came to
him in a mass. Then, as Badshah turned and set off at a rapid pace, the
bull-elephants followed.

When he arrived near the spot in which the man-eater was said to have his
lair, Dermot stopped them all. Despite her protests he tied Noreen firmly
with the _puggri_ to the rope crossing Badshah's pad. Then he drove his
animal into the herd of tuskers, which had crowded together, and divided
them into two bodies. The tiger was reported to lie up in a narrow _nullah_
filled and fringed with low bushes. From the near bank to where Badshah
stood the forest was free from undergrowth, which came to within a score of
yards of the far bank.

Badshah smelled the ground, and the other elephants followed his example
and, when they scented the tiger's trail, began to be restless and excited.
A sharp cry from Dermot and the two bodies of tuskers separated and moved
away, branching off half right and left, and disappeared in the
undergrowth.

Dermot cocked his double-barrelled rifle. There was a long pause. A strange
feeling of awe crept over Noreen at the realisation of her companion's
strange power over these great animals. No wonder the superstitious natives
believed him to be a god.

Presently there was a loud crashing in the undergrowth beyond the _nullah_,
and Noreen saw the saplings in it agitated, as if by the passage of the
elephants. The tiger gave no sign of life. The girl's heart beat fast, and
her breath came quickly. But her companion never moved.

Suddenly Noreen gasped, for through the screen of thin bushes that fringed
the edge of the _nullah_ a hideous painted mask was thrust out. It was a
tiger's face, the ears flattened to the skull, the eyes flaming, the lips
drawn back to bare the teeth in a ghastly snarl. The brute saw Badshah and
drew quietly back. A pause. Then it sprang into full view and poised for a
single instant on the far bank. But at that very moment the line of tuskers
burst out of the tangled undergrowth and the ti