"Indeed I could," replied the colonel. "Cause enough they had; not five yards behind them trotted the largest tiger it has ever been my fortune to see." Various exclamations testified to the completeness of the surprise to which Colonel Eyre had treated his audience. "Was it a man-eater?" I asked. "At first I supposed it was, but if it had been I never should have seen them alive. After I shot the beast----" "Oh, you did shoot him?" "Don't ask me how! I am counted a fair shot--I was far better then; but when I levelled my rifle at that brute's heart, when I realized how much hung on the result--for if I had missed, or if I had merely wounded him, he would have been in the tonga at a single spring, and nothing under heaven itself could have saved those dearest to me from a horrible death--when I realized all this, I don't know how I found the nerve to pull the trigger. I suppose I knew it was the only chance. My appearance had enraged the animal and he was just preparing to spring. This I do know, and I'm not ashamed to own it: when I saw that I had laid the tiger out with a single shot--a thing that doesn't happen twice in a lifetime--I fell flat beside the tonga in the act of helping my wife down; for the first and last time in my life I fainted. "Yes, it was a pretty hard trial on the nerves," resumed the colonel, as our discussion of the situation sank into silence, "but nothing to what my wife had gone through. That tiger had followed them for more than four miles through the jungle. The bilewallah, with rare presence of mind, had managed to keep the bullocks to their steady jog-trot--any increase of pace or appearance of flight would have provoked a spring. She, poor woman, had succeeded in hushing her baby, for had the child cried, nothing is surer than that the sound would have led to an attack. It must have been an awful four miles for her. It was years before she recovered from the effect." "And why did not the tiger attack them?" inquired Jones. "Does any one know?" "The animal was doubtless waiting to kill them till they got into the vicinity of water," explained Colonel Eyre. "Tigers often do that with cattle and other large quarry. There was water a mile or less further on. I had noticed it myself in passing. If I had not come upon the ground, another ten minutes would have sealed their fate." "So it may fairly be said that your dream was the means of saving their lives," observed Tom Everton, who, although the most silent, had not been the least attentive of the listeners.