st the greatest of his own kind. He made the discovery one
sunlit day beside the Manipur River.

He was in the mud-bath, grunting and bubbling with content. It was a
bath with just room enough for one. And seeing that he was young, and
perhaps failing to measure his size, obscured as it was in the mud, a
great "rogue" bull came out of the jungles to take the bath for himself.

He was a huge creature--wrinkled and yellow-tusked and scarred from the
wounds of a thousand fights. His little red eyes looked out malignantly,
and he grunted all the insults the elephant tongue can compass to the
youngster that lolled in the bath. He confidently expected that Muztagh
would yield at once, because as a rule young twenty-five-year-olds do
not care to mix in battle with the scarred and crafty veterans of sixty
years. But he did not know Muztagh.

The latter had been enjoying the bath to the limit, and he had no desire
whatever to give it up. Something hot and raging seemed to explode in
his brain and it was as if a red glare, such as sometimes comes in the
sunset, had fallen over all the stretch of river and jungle before his
eyes. He squealed once, reared up with one lunge out of the bath--and
charged. They met with a shock.

Of all the expressions of power in the animal world, the elephant fight
is the most terrible to see. It is as if two mountains rose up from
their roots of strata and went to war. It is terrible to hear, too. The
jungle had been still before. The river glided softly, the wind was
dead, the mid-afternoon silence was over the thickets.

The jungle people were asleep. A thunder-storm would not have broken
more quickly, or could not have created a wilder pandemonium. The jungle
seemed to shiver with the sound.

They squealed and bellowed and trumpeted and grunted and charged. Their
tusks clicked like the noise of a giant's game of billiards. The
thickets cracked and broke beneath their great feet.

It lasted only a moment. It was so easy, after all. In a very few
seconds indeed, the old rogue became aware that he had made a very
dangerous and disagreeable mistake. There were better mud-baths on the
river, anyway.

He had not been able to land a single blow. And his wrath gave way to
startled amazement when Muztagh sent home his third. The rogue did not
wait for the fourth.

Muztagh chased him into the thickets. But he was too proud to chase a
beaten elephant for long. He halted, trumpeting, and swung back