ow he can make!'_"

Skag caught the deep thing that had stirred Cadman. The latter added
with a touch of scorn:

"Once I told this thing, as I have told you, to a group of Europeans in
a steamer's smoking room. And two of them laughed--thought I was
telling a funny story. . . . These priests are apt to be very bitter
toward one who wrongs one of their free-friends. They believe that it
is a just and good thing to make a man pay with his life, for taking
the life of a monkey; because it impedes his coming up and embitters
the others. One way to look at it?"

Skag was in and out of the jungle most of the days after Cadman left
for Bombay to sail. Closer and closer he drew to the deep, sweet
earthiness and the mysteries carried on outside the ken of most men.
One dawn, from a distance he watched a sambhur buck pause on the brow
of a hill. The creature shook his mane and lifted up his nose and
sniffed the dawn of day.

Skag knew that it was good to him, knew how the sensitive grey nostrils
quivered wide, drinking deep draughts of cool moist air. The grasses
were rested; the trees seemed enamoured of the deep shadows of night.
The river gurgled musically from the jagged rocks of her mid-current to
the overleaning vines and branches of her borders.

This was a side stream of the Nerbudda. Already Skag shared with the
natives the attitude of devotion to the great Nerbudda. She was sacred
to the people, and to every creature good, for her gift was like the
gift of mothers. When all the world was parched and full of deep
cracks, yawning beneath a heaven white and cloudless, and rain forsook
the land, and every leaf hung heavy and dust-laden; when heat and
thirst and famine all increased, till creatures crept forth from their
hot lairs at evening and moved in company--who had been enemies, but
for sore suffering--then would she yield up her pure tides to satisfy
their utmost craving. . . .

Skag lived deep through that morning. The rose and amber radiance of
dawn fell into all the hearts of all the birds; and wordless songs came
pulsing up from roots of growing things. The sambhur lifted high his
head again and spread the fan of one ear toward the wind, while one
breathed twice. Then there fell a sudden rustling on the branches; and
swift along the river's brim, the sharp, plaintive cry of monkeys,
beating down through all the startled stillness with their wailing
voices. These turned, hurrying away in one