The Monster Kabuli (Continued)

Skag did arrive from Poona that day. When Carlin did not come to the jungle-edge, and the vivid open area between him and the city showed no movement, he did not linger many minutes. Power had come to him from the waiting days, and this hour was the acid test. All his life he had refused to look back or look ahead, making the Now—the present moving point, his world—wasting no energy otherwise.

In the long waiting days, he had learned what many a man afield had been forced to learn in loneliness, that when he was very still, and feeling high, not too tired—in fact, when he could forget himself—something of Carlin came to him, over the miles.

But in spite of all he knew, much force of his life had strained forward to this moment of meeting. The shock of disappointment dazed him. His first thought was that there was some good reason; but after that, the misery of faint-heartedness stole in, and he wondered the old sad wonder—if love had changed.

Skag hurried back to the station where he had left the Great Dane, Nels, with Bhanah, who would have to find quarters for himself. Nels stood between the two, waiting for his orders; and wheeled with a dip of the head almost puppy-like when the man decided. So Skag walked on toward the road where Carlin lived; and at his heels, with dignity, strode one of the four great hunting dogs in India. Presently he saw Miss Annesley's head-servant, Deenah, running toward him—face grey with calamity.

And now Skag heard of the coming of the messenger with the strange elephant; and the black edging began to run about Deenah's tale, as he revealed the ugly possibilities in his own mind that the Monster Kabuli had his part in this sending:

". . . Now Hantee Sahib must learn," Deenah finished, "that not within four hours' journey from Hurda; nay, not within six hours' journey from Hurda, is there any native prince with the dignity of one elephant."

. . . They were walking rapidly toward the house of the chief commissioner whom Deenah said was away in the villages. Their hope of life and death fell upon the Deputy Commissioner-Sahib. Always as he spoke, Deenah's face steadily grew more grey, the rims of his eyes more red. His memories of the monster were flooding in like the rains over old river-beds, and there was no mercy for Skag in anything he said.

The Deputy Commissioner, a perfectly groomed man, leisurely appeared. He did not wear spectacle or glass; still there was a glisten about his eyes, as if one were there. He came out into the verandah opening a heavy cigarette-case of soft Indian gold. His head tilted back as if sipping from a cup, as he lit and inbreathed the cigarette. To Skag he seemed so utterly aloof, so irreparably out of touch with a man's needs at a moment like this, that he could not have asked a favour or adequately stated his case. Deenah took this part, however. If there were drama or any interest in the tale, there was no sign from the Deputy, whose eyes now cooled upon Nels, and widened. Presently he interrupted Deenah to inquire who owned this dog.

The servant signified the American, and Skag took the straight glisten of the Englishman's glance for the first time.

"May I inquire? From whom?"

Skag coldly told him that the dog had been owned by Police Commissioner Hichens of Bombay. . . . The deputy regretfully ordered Deenah to continue his narrative, and in the silence afterward, presently spoke the name:

"Neela Deo, of course—"

This meant the Blue God, the leader of the caravan; and signified the lordliest elephant in all India. . . . The Deputy, after a slight pause, answered himself:

"But Neela Deo is away with the chief commissioner. . . . Mitha Baba—"

There was another lilting pause. This referred to a female elephant, the meaning of whose name was "Sweet Baby." The Deputy capitulated:

"Mitha Baba, yes; especially since she knows the Hakima—and oh, I say, that's a strange tale, you know—"

He glanced from Deenah to Nels, to Skag; but received no encouragement to narrate same. Not in the least unbalanced, he tipped back his head and took another drink from between his smoky fingers; then his glassless eye glittered out through the white burning of the noon, as he added:

"But Mitha Baba would not chase a strange elephant, unless she
positively knew the creature was running off with her own Gul
Moti. . . . She's discriminating, is Mitha Baba. But I say, Gunpat
Rao came from the Vindhas, you know."

It dawned upon Skag that this wasn't monologue, but conversation; also that it had some vague bearing upon his own affairs. The pause was very slight, when the Deputy resumed:

"Yes, Gunpat Rao is from the Vindha Hills, within the life-time of one man. . . . Mitha Baba is as fast, but she won't do it; so there's an end. Gunpat Rao. . . . Gunpat Rao. The mahouts say young male elephants will follow a strange male for the chance of a fight. It's consistent enough. Yes, we'll call in Chakkra. . . . Are you ready to travel, sir?"

This was to Skag.

No array of terms could express how ready to travel was Sanford Hantee. The Bengali mahout, Chakkra, appeared; a sturdy little man with blue turban, red kummerband, and a scarf and tunic of white.

The Deputy flicked away his cigarette and now spoke fast—talk having to do with Nels, with the Hakima, with Gunpat Rao, who was his particular mahout's master, and of the strange elephant who had carried the two Sahibas away.

Chakkra reported at this point that he had seen this elephant in the market place, an old male—with a woman's howdah, covering too few of his wrinkles—and a mahout who would ruin the disposition of anything but a man-killer. Chakkra appeared to have an actual hatred toward this man, for he enquired of the Deputy:

"Have I your permission to deal with the mahout of this thief elephant?"

"Out of your own blood-lust—no. Out of necessity—yes."

A queer moment. It was as if one supposed only to crawl, had suddenly revealed wings. Not until this instant did Skag realise that a Chief Commissioner had the flower of England to pick his deputies from, and had made no mistake in this man. . . . A moment later, Nels had been given preliminary instruction, and Skag was lifted, with a playful flourish of the trunk, by Gunpat Rao himself, into the light hunting howdah. Chakkra was also in place, when the Deputy waved his hand with the remark:

"Oh, I say, I'd be glad of the chase, myself, but an official, you know, . . . and Lord, what a dog!"

The last was as Nels swung around in front of Gunpat Rao's trunk as if formally to remark: "You see we are to travel together to-day."

The Deputy detained them a second or two longer, while he brought his gun-case and a pair of pistols, to save the time of Skag procuring his own at the station. They heard him call, after the start:

"It might be a running fight, you know. . . ."

A little out, Nels was given the scent of the strange elephant and Deenah left them, with nothing to mitigate the evil discovery that Carlin and her friend had been carried straight through the open jungle country, toward the Vindhas; not at all in the direction the messenger had stated within hearing of the other servants.

A steady beat through Skag's tortured mind—was Deenah's story of the monster Kabuli; no softness nor mercy in those details. He had watched, in the Deputy, a man unfold, after the mysterious manner of the English. He had entered suddenly, abruptly into one of the most enthralling centres of fascination in Indian life—the elephant service. He had seen the exalted and complicated mechanism of a Chief Commissioner's Headquarters get down to individual business with remarkable speed and not the loss of an ounce of dignity. But under every feeling and thought—was the slow bass beat of Deenah's story about the monster Kabuli.

Nels had been called to the trail in the very hour of his arrival. Skag would have supposed their movement leisurely, except that he saw Nels steadily at work. Gunpat Rao, the most magnificent elephant in the Chief Commissioner's stockades—excepting Neela Deo and Mitha Baba—was making speed under him, at this moment. (Gunpat Rao had approved of him instantly, swinging him up into the howdah with a glad grace and a touch that would not unfreshen evening wear.)

Chakkra, the mahout, was singing the praises of Gunpat Rao, his master, as they rolled forward; flapping an ear to keep time and waving his ankas—the steel hook of which was never used.

"Kin to Neela Deo, is Gunpat Rao; liege-son to Neela Deo, the King!" he repeated.

It appeared that he was reminding Gunpat Rao, rather than informing the
American, of this honour.

"Did I not hear the Deputy Commissioner Sahib say that he came from the
Vindhas, and that Neela Deo is from High Himalaya?" Skag asked.

The mahout's face turned back; his trailing lids did not widen in the fierce sunlight. It was the face of a man still singing.

"The kinship is of honour, not of blood, Sahib," he answered.

Then Chakkra informed Skag that Kudrat Sharif, Neela Deo's mahout, was the third of his line to serve the Blue God, who was not yet nearly in the ictus of his power and beauty; while he, Chakkra, was the only mahout Gunpat Rao had known—since he came down from the Vindhian trap-stockades, where he was snared. He was about thirty years younger than Neela Deo, the King. Would the Sahib bear in mind that an elephant continues to increase in strength and wisdom for an hundred years? And now would he consider Gunpat Rao's size—the perfection of his shape? Might not such a Prince claim relationship to such a King?

. . . Chakkra then pointed out that when the grandson of his own little son should sit just here, behind the incomparable ears of his beloved—the ears with linings like flower-petals—so, looking out upon the world from a greater height than this—then doubtless people would have learned that another mighty elephant had come into the world.

Skag missed nothing of the talk. Another time it would have filled him with deep delight. It belonged to his own craft. A man might use all the words, of all the languages in all their flexibilities and never tell the whole truth of his own craft. In fact, a man can only drop a point here and there about his life work. One never comes to the end.

Also before his eyes was the joy of Nels in action—the big fellow leaping to his task, steadily drawing them on, it appeared; and always a breath of ease would blow across Skag's being as he noted the quickening; but when that was merely sustained for a while, the hope of it wore away, and he wanted more and more speed—past any giving of man or beast. . . . The old drum of the Kabuli tale constantly recurred, as if a trap door to the deeps were often lifted. Skag would brush his hand across his brow, shading his head with his helmet lifted apart for a moment, to let the sunless air circulate.

They passed through the open jungle merging into a country of low hills and frequent villages. The rains that had broken in Poona had not yet reached this country. . . . The sun went down and the afterglow changed the world. Carlin's afterglow, it was to Skag, from their moment at the edge of the jungle—on the evening of the troth; there was pain about it now. India had a different look to him—alien, sinister, of a depth of suffering undreamed of, because of the beating bass of the Kabuli tale, intensified by the sense that falling night would slacken the chase. . . .

Skag had lost the magic of externals, the drift of his great interest. All his lights were around Carlin, and powers of hatred, altogether foreign to his faculties, pressed upon him in the threat of the hour. . . . Yes, Chakkra remembered the five Kabuli men who had sat in the market-place. Yes, he remembered the story of the beating of the monster, the long slow healing after that; and his last look, as he left Hurda for the last time. . . .

It was well, Chakkra said, that they had open country for the chase. It was well that the Kabuli did not call to the Sahibas, and hide them in one of the great Mohammedan households of Hurda—where even Indian Government might not search. It was well that the Kabuli did not dare to come closer to Hurda than this, so that they had a chance to overtake his elephant afield, before the walls of the purdah closed. . . .

Such was the burden of Chakkra's ramble, and there was no balm in it for Skag. The weight settled heavier and heavier upon him with the ending of the day. Nels was a phantom of grey before them in the shadows, leisurely showing his powers. At times, while he ranged far ahead, they would not hear him for several minutes; then possibly a half-humorous sniff in the immediate dark, and they knew the big fellow waited for Gunpat Rao to catch up. Once he was lost ahead so long that Skag spoke:

"Nels—"

The answer was a bound of feet and a whine below that pulled the man's hand over the rim of the howdah, as if to reach and touch his good friend.

"Take it, Nels—good work, old man," Skag said.

They passed through zones of coolness as the trail sank into hollows between the hills, and Gunpat Rao rolled forward. Pitch and roll, pitch and roll—as many movements as a solar system and the painful illusion of slowness over all. Often in Skag's nostrils one of the subtlest of all scents made itself known, but most elusively—a suggestion of shocking power—like an instant's glimpse into another dimension. If you answer at all to an expression which at best only intimates—the smell of living dust—you will have something of the thing that Skag sensed in the emanation of Gunpat Rao, warming to action.

Occasionally as they crossed the streams there was delay in finding the trail on the other side. Once in the dark after a ford, when Nels had rushed along the left bank to find the scent, Gunpat Rao plunged straight on to the right without waiting; and the mahout sang his praises with low but fiery intensity:

"He is coming. He is coming into his own!"

"What do you mean, Chakkra? Make it clear to me who have not many words of Hindi—"

"The meaning of our journey appears to him, Sahib; from our minds, from the thief ahead and from the great dog,—the thing that we do is appearing to him. He knows the way—see—"

Nels had come in from the lateral and found that Gunpat Rao was right. An amazing point to Skag, this. The great head before him, with Chakkra's legs dangling behind the ears, had grasped something of the urge of their chase. A vast and mysterious mechanism was locked in the great grey skull. Actually Gunpat Rao seemed to laugh that he had shown the way to Nels.

"You don't mean, Chakkra, that he goes into the silence like a holy man?"

"It is like."

Skag had seen something of this in his India—the yogi men shutting their eyes and bowing their heads and seeming to sink their consciousness into themselves, in order to ascertain some fact without and afar off.

"Our lord gives his mind to the matter and the truth unfolds—" Chakkra added.

"Will the other elephant travel through the night so steadily?"

(The sense of his own powerlessness was in him like a spear.)

"Not like this, Sahib," said Chakkra.

The hint, however, was that the thief elephant would make all speed; that the lead of the four hours would be conserved as carefully as possible by the other mahout.

"But he has a woman's howdah," Chakkra invariably added. "Two Sahibas, as well as the mahout himself. . . . To-morrow will tell—hai, to-morrow will tell, if they go that far!"

That was always the point of the blackest fear—that the elephant ahead should come to some Mohammedan household, and leave Carlin where no one could pass the veil.

"But what of the messenger who brought word to the Sahibas?" Skag asked.

"He would slip away. Some hiding place for him—possibly back at
Hurda."

Chakkra seemed sure of this.

That was Skag's long night. He tried to think of the Kabuli as if he were an animal. A man might have a destroying enmity against a cobra or a tiger or a python; but it was not black and self-defiling like this thing which crept over him, out of the miasma of Deenah's tale.

In the dawn they reached a small river. Skag saw Nels lose his tread in the deepening centre, swing down with the current an instant and then strike his balance, swimming. Here was coolness and silence. To-night he would know. To-night, if he did not have Carlin—

. . . Gunpat Rao stood shoulder-deep in the stream. Skag fancied a gleam of deep massive humour under the tilt of the great ear below him, as the elephant, none too delicately, set his foot forward into the deeper part of the stream. His trunk and Chakkra's voice were raised together—for Chakkra was slipping:

"Hai, my Prince, would you go without me? Would you leave the Sahib alone in his proving-time? Would you leave my children fatherless? . . . There is none other—"

They stood in the lifting day overlooking a broad sloping country—the
Vindha peaks faintly outlined in the far distance.

"It is the broad valley of Nerbudda," Chakkra said, "full of milk and wine against the seasons. One good day of travel ahead to the bank of Holy Nerbudda, Sahib, before the fall of night—if the chase holds so long."

Skag did not eat this day. It was not until high noon that they halted by a spring of sweet water, and the American thought of his thirst. Nels was leaner. He plunged to the water; then back to the scent again with a far challenge call. (It was like the echo of his challenge to the cheetah as the wall of the waters loomed across the hills, above Poona.) On he went, seriously; his mouth open in the great heat, his tongue rocking on its centre like nothing else.

Gunpat Rao seemed gradually overcoming obstructions; as if his great idea mounted and cleared, his body requiring time to strike its rhythm. Chakkra sang to him. The sun became hotter and higher—until it hung at the very top of the universe and forgot nothing. There was a stillness in the hills that would frighten anything but a fever bird to silence. To Skag it was a weight against speech and he sat rigidly for many moments at a time—all his life of forest and city, of man and creature, passing before his tortured eyes. . . . And the words Carlin had spoken; all the mysteries of his nights near Poona when she had seemed to draw near as he fell asleep—seemed to be there as he came forth from a dream. Always he had thought he could never forget the dreams—only to find them gone utterly, before he stood upon his feet. Past all, was the marvel of the hunting cheetah day, when he looked at the beast that gave no answer to his force; only murder in its savage heart—and Carlin's name was his very breath in that peril, something of her spirit like a whisper from within his own heart.

All that afternoon Skag's eyes strained ahead, and his respect grew for the thief elephant with his greater burden, and his wonder increased for Nels and Gunpat Rao. One dim far peak held his eyes from time to time; but Skag lived in the low beat of India's misery—the fever and famine; the world of veils and the miseries beyond knowledge of the world. He sank and sank until he was chilled, even though the sweat of the day's fierce burning was upon him. He understood hate and death, the thirst to kill; the slow ruin that comes at first to the human mind, suddenly cut off from the one held more dear than life. It seemed all boyish dazzle that he had ever found loveliness in this place. That boyishness had passed. In this hour he saw only hatred ahead and mockery, if Carlin—. . . but the far dim peak of misty light held his aching eyes.

"Go on, Nels—on, old man," he would call.

And Chakkra would turn with protest that could not find words—his tongue silenced by the lean terrible face in the howdah behind him. Presently Chakkra would fall to talking to his master, muttering in a kind of thrall at the thing he saw in the countenance of the American who had touched bottom.

Sanford Hantee was facing the worst of the past and an impossible future, having neither hate nor pity, now. Yet from time to time with a glance at the gun-case at his feet, he spoke with cold clearness:

"We must overtake them before night."

Chakkra, who had ceased singing, would bow, saying:

"The trail is hot, Sahib. They are not far."

Steadily beneath them, Gunpat Rao straightened out, lengthening his roll, softening his pitch. Nels was not trotting now, but in a long low run. Skag was aghast at himself, that his heart did not go out to these magnificent servants. There was not feeling within him to answer these verities of courage and endurance; yet he could remember the human that had been in his heart.

The low hills had broken away behind them; the first veil of twilight in the air. A shelving dip opened, showing the bottom of the valley. Skag could see nothing ahead—but Nels lying closer to the trail. Chakkra's shoulder was suddenly within reach of Skag's hand, for the head of his master was lifted.

As the great curve of Gunpat Rao's trumpet arched before his face—two things happened to Skag. A full blast of hot breath drove through him; and a keen high vibrant tone pierced every nerve. Then Chakkra shouted:

"Gunpat Rao, prince of Vindha—declares the chase is on! Hold fast,
Sahib,—we go!"

The earth rose up and the heavens tipped. There was no foundation; the bulwarks of earth's crust had given away. The landscape was racing past—but backward—and Nels, yet ahead, was a still, whirring streak. The thing hardly believed and never seen in America—that the elephant is speed-king of the world—was revelation now! No pitch or roll; a long curving sweep this—seeming scarcely to touch the ground. This was the going Skag had called for—a night and a day. And Nels was labouring beside them now, but seeming to miss his tread—seeming to run on ice.

"Hai!" yelled Chakkra. "Who says there is none other than Neela Deo?"

A thread of silver stretched before them, crossing the line of their course. It broadened in a man's breath. They turned the curve of the last slope, and heard the shout of the mahout far ahead. The thief elephant was running along Nerbudda's margin to a ford.

A roar was about Skag's head and shoulders like a storm—Gunpat Rao trumpeting again! The landscape blurred. The forward beast was growing large . . . two standing figures above him—the fling of a white arm!

The huge red howdah rocked as the thief elephant entered the river; a moment more, only the howdah showing. Distantly like the hum of furious insects, Skag heard Chakkra's chant:

"The thief is snared! Holy Nerbudda herself weaved the snare. . . .
The hand of destiny is ours, Sahib. Nay, mine, not thine! Did not the
Deputy Commissioner Sahib say by necessity? . . . Plunge in! . . .
Hai, but softly. Prince of thy kind, take the water softly, I say—"

And Gunpat Rao entered the river at a swimming stroke. Skag's eyes had hardly turned from the great red howdah. There was a keen squeal from ahead, answered by a fiery hissing intake of Chakkra's breath:

"That, Sahib, is the murderous mahout using his steel hook. . . . Yes, it was by necessity, the Deputy Sahib said. Certainly it was by necessity!"

The fling of a white arm again. Sanford Hantee was standing.

"Carlin!" he called.

The answer came back to him in some mystery of imperishable vibration.

"I am here."

The two great beasts were moiled together against the stream. . . . The man and woman, whose eyes still held, might have missed the flash of steel that Chakkra parried with his ankas. In fact, it was the sound of a quick gasp of Margaret Annesley that made them turn, just as Chakkra shouted:

"By necessity, Sahib! . . . It is accomplished!"

The other's blade had whirled into the water. They had heard the welt as Chakkra's ankas came down. The strange mahout looked drunken and spineless for a second; then there was a red gush under his white cloth as he pitched into the stream.

The Great Dane had just caught up. He was in the river below them—not doubting his part had come.

"Nels, steady! Let him go!" Skag called. "Don't touch, old man!"

And then, after the thief elephant, having no fight in him, was made fast, they heard Chakkra singing his song, but paid no attention. . . .

It was a longer journey back to Hurda, for they came slowly, but there was no haste; and two, at least, in the hunting howdah could transcend passing time, each by the grace of the other. Gunpat Rao was returned to the Deputy Sahib with an amulet to add to his trophy-winnings; and a sentence or two that might have been taken from the record of Neela Deo himself. The thief elephant was found to be a runaway that had fallen into native hands. And Nels was restored to Bhanah by the way of the heart of Carlin Deal. . . .

They never found out how far the two women would have been taken beyond the Nerbudda. After they had first mounted into the red howdah at Hurda, the messenger of the Kabuli had disappeared into the crowd and was not seen again. . . . As for the monster himself, he had suffered enough to plan craftily. (The Nerbudda took his mahout and covered him quite as deeply as the crowd had covered his messenger at Hurda.)

Much in his silence afterward, and in the great still joy that had come to him, Sanford Hantee chose to reflect upon the mystery of pain he had known on the lonely out-journey—the spiritless incapacity to cope with life—the loss even of his mastercraft with animals. He would look toward Carlin in such moments and then look away, or possibly look within. By her, the meanings of all life were sharpened—jungle and jungle-beast, monster, saint and man—the breath of all life more keen.