“You mean what you want to know, don’t you?” said Ommony, chuckling.
Jeff laughed aloud.
“You’re right. Charley wrote such a glowing account of you that Strange is suspicious. You know, a multi-millionaire is a poor —— who thinks every one is trying to work him for something. Thirty per cent of what he thinks is true. Strange can’t escape even in India. There’s a lady on his heels. He wants to abuse your hospitality until Venus sets, and he’d like to be sure in advance that you won’t work him for anything.”
“What will you tell him?” asked Ommony.
“Shall I send for my tent from the station, or have you a spare bed?” Jeff answered.
So Jeff’s big tent was pitched, and two of the dogs adopted it forthwith, while Jeff’s one servant cleaned his boots alongside in the sun and bragged to Ommony’s assembled household about Jeff’s prowess.
“As a horse, he is, yet stronger! Lo, with his fist, thus, he slew a man! They say the skull was broken like an egg-shell, but that I saw not. I have seen him lift a boat with two men in it. When the wrestlers from Tirhoot came to Delhi he threw them all, one by one, and he not weary at the end. They say that once, when men of evil purpose locked him behind doors, he broke down a door with nothing but his hands, and smote them with the pieces of it. Yet he laughs, and his heart is as a woman’s, but not as a too inquisitive woman’s. The dastari[1] is good.”
So they were now three who trod the jungle-lanes, and laughed until rocks that had known the laughter of four forgotten races re-echoed to the high, the middle and the bass—until the junglis brought word of a bear, hurt fighting, whom the flies were driving mad, and Jeff strode off to end that misery. (For Ommony is a prince of hosts, reserving to himself no more than right to judge emergency.)
The bear-skin lay pegged out, raw-side upward, in the sun the morning Strange came, and Charley told him how Jeff had to use four bullets and the butt. Jeff’s leg was bandaged; it was nothing serious, but he did not walk to the station.
“I hope you didn’t shoot all the game before I got here,” Strange growled when he met Jeff on the veranda. “Hurt again? You’re always in trouble!”
He was suffering from bachelor’s spleen, and as fearful for his tracks as a hunted animal.
“I think I’ve given a miss in balk,” he said, sitting down at the breakfast-table next to Ommony. “It’s in the papers that I’m on my way home. Met your sister—splendid woman! It was she who first suggested my visiting you. What’s Charley doing? Shooting game too?”
“Visiting me,” said Ommony, meeting no man’s eye.
“I meant that you and I and Ramsden——” Strange began.
“I’ve invited Charley too,” said Ommony.
“He has his living to get.”
“Charley has lived more and better in these last few days than in all his previous life,” said Ommony. “You’re entirely welcome here, Strange; but so’s he.”
“Hurrumm!” Strange nearly exploded, then governed himself. “Where did you get these eggs? They’re the best I’ve had in India.”
So Ommony talked poultry for a while, and of the business of keeping leopards from the hen-house, which calls for ingenuity.
“Why don’t you shoot ’em all?” Strange asked him.
“I shoot nothing in the jungle as long as it behaves.”
“D’you call stealing chickens behavior?”
“It’s natural to leopards.”
“Then you mean we’re to shoot nothing but beasts that have broken through the hen-wire?” Strange asked disgustedly.
“You’ll find criminals in the jungle in the same proportion as among humans,” Ommony answered.
“How do you tell ’em?”
Strange had decided Ommony was crazy, and made a perfectly obvious effort to humor him. You could almost hear the mental mechanism click as he decided to cut his visit short.
“They’re just like other criminals. They tell you,” answered Ommony.
Strange sat there looking like Ulysses Grant without the modesty. His was the only face at table that was legible. He resembled the bear that Jeff killed, hurt and driven nearly crazy by the flies of public criticism, and the servants were afraid of him, hardly daring to hand him things to eat. Jeff and Charley, having experienced his moods, were careful to say nothing, so the brunt of it fell on their host, who was at a loss for the present how to manage the situation. Silence fell, as if the fun of recent days had dried up and blown away along a bitter wind.
“I came to kill a tiger,” Strange said suddenly.
“I believe you did. I think you shall,” said Ommony.
“Now I wonder what the —— you mean by that remark?” Strange asked him.
One thing was obvious. Strange had looked up Ommony in the Gazette and so believed him to be quite a minor personage. He spoke rather as a man might to his game-keeper—a man who deserved neither game nor keeper, but had both. It was in his mind that no man drawing such small salary in the middle-age was of much account, or had much right to dispense the forest privileges. Feudalism, an ancient gas that ever crept along with money, and deluded men, caused him to regard his host as some one who had scant option in the matter. He didn’t enjoy being kotowed to, but expected it, and his new great business organization had made him more tyrannous than ever.
Breakfast, that should have struck the key-note for holiday and comradeship, came to an end on B-flat, and Jeff Ramsden tried to corner Strange alone; for Jeff fears nothing except his own slow-wittedness, which he strangely over-estimates.
“Look here,” he began; but Ommony interrupted him, sent him and Charley on imaginary business of looking for a leopard’s spoor across the vegetable garden, and took Strange off alone to introduce him to the wilderness.
'THEY took rifles and walked to the look-out rock—two miles down a fire-lane rutted by the wheels of loaded carts.
Strange’s mood backed and veered without improving. He may have been wondering why he, a man with an income in the millions, should have to hide himself in a forest. From hat to shoe-soles, rifles and all, the same two hundred dollar bill would have purchased the entire kit, down to the skin, of either himself or Ommony. It annoyed him that Ommony strode beside him like the owner of the place.
“I’ve a notion,” he said presently, “to buy a tract of desert in Nevada or somewhere, and plant such a forest as this.”
“Money won’t do it,” said Ommony.
“Oh, you can always hire brains.”
“But not knowledge. Once a man knows, he’s his own man.”
“Well, they hired you, didn’t they?”
“Who did?”
“The Indian Government.”
“Not at all. I offered them my services—years ago—for just so long as I believe I can be useful.”
“They pay you.”
“No. The forest pays me. When I cease to row my own weight and over, I’ll resign.
Strange was piqued, but interested.
“Well! Suppose I offer you double what you’re getting here, to come and superintend my forest?”
“You