the English officer's heart,
because he himself was learning what love means. Before his hour with
Carlin in the afterglow, on their way back from the monkey glen, he
would never have dreamed that there was such feeling in the world; in
fact, he would have been unable to read the vivid story of it in the
officer's face. . . . So much in a second or two.

The cot had been partly lifted into the coach. The face now was
uncovered--the white wasted face of a lovely woman, a woman still
living; an utterly delicate face, telling the story of one who had
never met a rough impact from the world. It was as if there had always
been a strong hand between her and the grit and the grind of
world-affairs--first her father's and then the lover's. In the great
silence, the eyelids opened. It seemed that night and chill had
suddenly come in. The lips moved. The most mournful and hopeless
voice spoke straight into Skag's eyes:

"Oh, won't you please stop those fever birds!"

Skag supposed it an isolated sentence of delirium. He didn't
understand. There was a drive of drama or tragedy back of it, but his
mind did not give him details. He did not see the English officer
again. He did not know if he entered the train. One thing Skag knew:
Deep under that narrow masculine face there was a capacity for feeling
that this officer's men never saw; that his closest associates never
saw. The American reverenced the secret. . . . Sometimes during the
hushes of the night, when the train stopped for a moment, Skag lying
awake, heard the voice of the woman. There was a feeling from it
utterly strange to him. It carried him out of himself, as if he shared
something of her delirium and something of the man's agony.

The next day was one of the hardest that Skag ever lived, for Carlin
was not at Hurda to meet him. She had gone with a strange elephant
into the country. That was the day of the chase on the great young
elephant Gunpat Rao, the day in which the story of the monster Kabuli
unfolded. The face of the man at the mountain station and the sentence
of the woman were completely erased from his surface consciousness, as
the memory of an illness.

That was months away, and life had been very full in between. . . .

Carlin said she was just tired, when he went to her room in the
morning. She looked at him long. It suddenly came to him vaguely,
that she wasn't thinking; rather that her eyes were merely turned to
his fac