He had been very anxious to see
something of that aspect of Indian life, and he had snatched at the
chance Kepple had given him. But they had scarcely started before the
expedition was brought to an end by an accident, Kepple was thrown by
a pony and his ankle broken. He and Benham bandaged it as well as they
could, and a litter was sent for, and meanwhile they had to wait in the
camp that was to have been the centre of their jungle raids. The second
day of this waiting was worse for Kepple than the first, and he suffered
much from the pressure of this amateurish bandaging. In the evening
Benham got cool water from the well and rearranged things better; the
two men dined and smoked under their thatched roof beneath the big
banyan, and then Kepple, tired out by his day of pain, was carried to
his tent. Presently he fell asleep and Benham was left to himself.

Now that the heat was over he found himself quite indisposed to sleep.
He felt full of life and anxious for happenings.

He went back and sat down upon the iron bedstead beneath the banyan,
that Kepple had lain upon through the day, and he watched the soft
immensity of the Indian night swallow up the last lingering colours of
the world. It left the outlines, it obliterated nothing, but it stripped
off the superficial reality of things. The moon was full and high
overhead, and the light had not so much gone as changed from definition
and the blazing glitter and reflections of solidity to a translucent and
unsubstantial clearness. The jungle that bordered the little encampment
north, south, and west seemed to have crept a little nearer, enriched
itself with blackness, taken to itself voices.

(Surely it had been silent during the day.)

A warm, faintly-scented breeze just stirred the dead grass and the
leaves. In the day the air had been still.

Immediately after the sunset there had been a great crying of peacocks
in the distance, but that was over now; the crickets, however,
were still noisy, and a persistent sound had become predominant, an
industrious unmistakable sound, a sound that took his mind back to
England, in midsummer. It was like a watchman's rattle--a nightjar!

So there were nightjars here in India, too! One might have expected
something less familiar. And then came another cry from far away over
the heat-stripped tree-tops, a less familiar cry. It was repeated. Was
that perhaps some craving leopard, a tiger cat, a panther?--

"HUNT, HUNT"; tha