The elephant brought the threatening foot to the ground but stood, with curled trunk and ears cocked forward, ready to annihilate him if the invisible speaker gave the word. The girl shrank against the great animal, clinging to it and looking with horror at the prostrate man. The _Amban_ slowly dragged his bruised body from the ground and staggered shaken and dizzy out of the garden. Muriel kissed the soft trunk and laid her cheek against it, and it curved to touch her hair with a gentle caress. Then she fled into the bungalow to find Colonel Dermot on the verandah grimly watching the Chinaman stumbling blindly up the steep road. His wife beside him opened her arms to the shaken girl. "He shall pay for that some day, Muriel," said the Political Officer sternly. "But not yet." An hour later the two women watched the snaking line crawl up the steep face of the mountains, and through field-glasses they could distinguish Badshah with his master on his neck, the _Deb Zimpun_ and his followers and the tall form of the Chinaman, until all vanished from sight in the trees clothing the upper hills. Benson and Carter left that afternoon, Muriel remaining to spend a longer time with her friend and, as she told Wargrave, to try and regain the affections of the children which he had stolen from her. Frank was thinking of her next day as he was standing on the Mess verandah after tea, cleaning his fowling-piece, when on a wooded spur running down from the mountains and sheltering the little station on the west he heard a jungle-cock crowing in the undergrowth not four hundred yards away. Seizing a handful of cartridges he loaded his gun and, running down the steps and across the garden, plunged into the jungle. He walked cautiously, his rope-soled boots enabling him to move silently, and stopped occasionally to listen for the bird's crow or the telltale pattering over the dried leaves. Peering into the undergrowth and searching the ground he crept quietly forward. Suddenly his heart seemed to leap to his throat. In a patch of dust he saw the unmistakable _pug_ (footprint) of a large panther. One claw had indented a new-fallen leaf, showing that the animal had very recently passed. Wargrave halted and thought hard. He had only his shotgun, but the sun was near its setting and if he returned to the Mess to get his rifle--which was taken to pieces and locked up in its case--darkness would probably fall before he could overtake the panther, which was possibly moving on ahead of him. So he resolved not to turn back, but opened the breech of his gun and extracted the cartridges. With his knife he cut their thick cases almost through all round at the wad, dividing the powder from the shot. For he knew that thus treated and fired the whole upper portion of the cartridges would be shot out of the barrels like solid bullets and carry forty yards without breaking up and scattering the shot.