ttle hill behind the
dining-tent. The great tusker moved evenly along, bearing on the pad an
enormous yellow carcass, at which the little _mahout_ glanced
occasionally over his shoulder. Astride of the dead king sat the ryot,
who had directed Isaacs, crooning a strange psalm of victory in his
outlandish northern dialect, and occasionally clapping his hands over
his head with an expression of the most intense satisfaction I have ever
seen on a human face. The little band came to the middle of the camp
where the other tigers, now cut up and skinned elsewhere, had been
deposited the night before, and as the elephant knelt down, the
shikarries pulled the whole load over, pad, tiger, ryot and all, the
latter skipping nimbly aside. There he lay, the great beast that had
taken so many lives. We stretched him out and measured him--eleven feet
from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail, all but an inch--as a
little more straightening fills the measure, eleven feet exactly.

Meanwhile, the servant and shikarries collected, and the noise of the
exploit went abroad. The sun was just rising when Mr. Ghyrkins put his
head out of his tent and wanted to know "what the deuce all this
_tamaesha_ was about."

"Oh, nothing especial," I called out. "Isaacs has killed an eleven foot
man-eater in the night. That is all."

"Well I'm damned," said Mr. Ghyrkins briefly, and to the point, as he
stared from his tent at the great carcass, which lay stretched out for
all to see, the elephant having departed.

"Clear off those fellows and let me have a look at him, can't you?" he
called out, gathering the tent curtains round his neck; and there he
stood, his jolly red face and dishevelled gray hair looking as if they
had no body attached at all.

I went back to our quarters. Isaacs was putting the ears, which he had
carefully cleansed from blood, into a silver box of beautiful
workmanship, which Narain had extracted from his master's numerous
traps.

"Take that box to Miss Westonhaugh's tent," he said, giving it to the
servant, "with a greeting from me--with 'much peace.'" The man went out.

"She will send the box back," said I. "Such is the Englishwoman. She
will take a pair of tiger's ears that nearly cost you your life, and she
would rather die than accept the bit of silver in which you enclose
them, without the 'permission of her uncle.'"

"I do not care," he said, "so long as she keeps the ears. But unless I
am much mistaken, she