But before the man returned a boar was started up and Colonel Myles started off in pursuit. The boar dashed into the underbrush, the Colonel and a dozen natives after him full tilt, and the farther that boar ran the madder he got. He didn’t like being chased, and I suppose no sensible boar would like it. Directly he made a sharp turn and rushed out of the bushes to the river bank where the Major was sitting on his horse waiting for his spear. Seeing a man on a horse the boar very naturally thought that he must be the person who had been after him, and so, full of vengeance, he dashed at him at full speed, his horrid tusks glistening in the sunlight. Instantly the Major pulled his feet out of the stirrups and drew his sword. There was no time to ride away. But the sword was short, and the boar was very close to the horse, who snorted and plunged so that the Major could scarcely keep his seat, much less get a fair crack at the boar. [Illustration: THE MAJOR AND THE BOAR.] If the savage beast had succeeded in getting under the horse he would have wounded him desperately. But Major Alden was a cool and a brave man. He kept the horse away from the boar as well as he could, and at last he got a good chance, and down came his sword on the boar’s neck. But this cut did not seem to cool the boar’s courage very much. The savage animal still charged, the horse plunged and the Major slashed, and so the fight went on—charge, plunge, slash, until the Colonel came riding up with his spear, and soon put an end to the career of the ferocious boar. The next time the Major and Colonel Myles went out to hunt they went after tigers. Tiger hunting is very popular among the white residents of India, and it is well that it is, for the natives do not often succeed so well in their hunts after tigers, as the tigers succeed in their hunts after the natives. It is astonishing to read, in the government reports, how many people are annually killed by tigers in some parts of India. The Colonel’s first tiger hunt was not a very ambitious one. He did not go out into the jungle on an elephant in company with forty or fifty natives, but he and the Major, with two or three followers, started off on foot. They walked a long distance without seeing a sign of tigers, although they were in a place where two bullocks had been killed by these animals the previous night. Towards noon, however, one of the natives discovered the plain tracks of a tiger, and the party followed the trail until they lost it in a mass of rocks. In these rocks, however, was a large cave, and the natives assured them that they would find the animal in this cave. No one was particularly anxious to go into it to see if the tiger was there, but, peering carefully in at the entrance of the cave, the Colonel was sure that he saw something gleaming far back in the darkness, and he thought that the bright spot must be one of the tiger’s eyes.