rushed along the left bank to find the scent, Gunpat Rao plunged
straight on to the right without waiting; and the mahout sang his
praises with low but fiery intensity:

"He is coming. He is coming into his own!"

"What do you mean, Chakkra? Make it clear to me who have not many
words of Hindi--"

"The meaning of our journey appears to him, Sahib; from our minds, from
the thief ahead and from the great dog,--the thing that we do is
appearing to him. He knows the way--see--"

Nels had come in from the lateral and found that Gunpat Rao was right.
An amazing point to Skag, this. The great head before him, with
Chakkra's legs dangling behind the ears, had grasped something of the
urge of their chase. A vast and mysterious mechanism was locked in the
great grey skull. Actually Gunpat Rao seemed to laugh that he had
shown the way to Nels.

"You don't mean, Chakkra, that he goes into the silence like a holy
man?"

"It is like."

Skag had seen something of this in his India--the yogi men shutting
their eyes and bowing their heads and seeming to sink their
consciousness into themselves, in order to ascertain some fact
_without_ and afar off.

"Our lord gives his mind to the matter and the truth unfolds--" Chakkra
added.

"Will the other elephant travel through the night so steadily?"

(The sense of his own powerlessness was in him like a spear.)

"Not like this, Sahib," said Chakkra.

The hint, however, was that the thief elephant would make all speed;
that the lead of the four hours would be conserved as carefully as
possible by the other mahout.

"But he has a woman's howdah," Chakkra invariably added. "Two Sahibas,
as well as the mahout himself. . . . To-morrow will tell--hai,
to-morrow will tell, if they go that far!"

That was always the point of the blackest fear--that the elephant ahead
should come to some Mohammedan household, and leave Carlin where no one
could pass the veil.

"But what of the messenger who brought word to the Sahibas?" Skag asked.

"He would slip away. Some hiding place for him--possibly back at
Hurda."

Chakkra seemed sure of this.

That was Skag's long night. He tried to think of the Kabuli as if he
were an animal. A man might have a destroying enmity against a cobra
or a tiger or a python; but it was not black and self-defiling like
this thing which crept over him, out of the miasma of Deenah's tale.

In the dawn they reached a small river. Skag saw Nels lose h