Book: Son of Power

W >> Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost >> Son of Power




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.




CHAPTER X

_Hand-of-a-God_

Skag and Carlin had come back from Poona where five of Carlin's seven
brothers had been present at her marriage. There were weeks in Hurda
now, while Skag's equipment for jungle work arrived bit by bit. They
lived some distance from the city and back from the great
Highway-of-all-India, in Malcolm M'Cord's bungalow, a house to remember
for several reasons.


The Indian jungles were showing Skag deep secrets about wild
animals--knowledge beyond his hopes. Some things that he thought he
knew in the old days as a circus-trainer were beginning to look curious
and obsolete, but much still held good, even became more and more
significant. The things he had known intuitively did not diminish.
These had to do with mysterious talents of his own, and dated back to
the moment he stood for the first time before one of the "big cat"
cages at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. That was his initiation-day
in a craft in which he had since gone very far as white men go--even
into the endless fascination of the cobra-craft.

Skag was meeting now from time to time in his jungle work some of the
big hunters of India, men whose lives were a-seethe with tales of
adventure. When they talked, however, Skag slowly but surely grasped
the fact that what they had was "outside stuff." They knew trails,
defensive and fighting habits, species and calls; they knew a great
collection of detached facts about animals but it was all like what one
would see in a strange city--watching from outside its wall. There was
a certain boundary of observation which they never passed. All that
Skag cared to know was across, on the inner side of the wall.

As for the many little hunters, they were tame; only their bags were
"wild." They never even approached the boundary. Skag reflected much
on these affairs. It dawned on him at last, that when you go out with
the idea of killing a creature, you may get its attitude toward death,
but you won't learn about how it regards life.

The more you give, the more you get from any relation. This is not
only common knowledge among school-teachers, but among stock-raisers
and rose-growers. Almost every man has had experience with a real
teacher, at least once in his life--possibly only a few weeks or even
days, but a bit of real teaching--when something within opened and
answered as never before. It was like an extension of consciousness.
If you look back you'll find that you loved that teacher--at least,
liked that one differently, very deep.

Skag wanted a great deal. He wanted more from the jungle doubtless
than was ever formulated in a white man's mind before. He wanted to
know what certain holy men know; men who dare to walk to and fro in the
jungles without arms, apparently without fear. He wanted to know what
the priests of Hanuman know about monkeys; and what _mahouts_ of famous
elephants like Neela Deo and Mithi Baba and Gunpat Rao of the Chief
Commissioner's stockades, know about elephants.

At this point one reflection was irresistible. The priests of Hanuman
gave all they had--care, patience, tenderness, even their lives, to the
monkey people. There were no two ways about the _mahouts_; they loved
the elephants reverently; even regarding them as beings more exalted
than men. As for the holy men--the sign manual of their order was love
for all creatures. No, there was no getting away from the fact that
you must give yourself to a thing if you want to know it. . . . Skag
would come up breathless out of this contemplation--only to find it was
the easiest thing he did--to love wild animals. . . .

Skag had reason to hold high his trust in animals. He had entered the
big cat cages countless times and always had himself and the animals in
hand. He had made good in the tiger pit-trap and certainly the loose
tiger near the monkey glen didn't charge. All this might have
established the idea that all animals were bound to answer his love for
them.

But India was teaching him otherwise.

In the hills back of Poona he had met a murderer. That cat-scream at
the last chilled him to the very centre of things. Cheetahs were
malignant; no two ways about that. Skag hadn't failed. He never was
better. There was no fear nor any lack of concentration in his work
upon the cheetah beast. Any tiger he knew would have answered to his
cool force, but the cheetah didn't.

It was the same with the big snake in the grass jungle. Skag had met
fear there--something of monstrous proportion, more powerful than will,
harder to deal with by a wide margin than any plain adjustment to
death. It stayed with him. It was more formidable than pain. He had
talked with Cadman about a peculiar inadequacy he felt in dealing with
the snake--as if his force did not penetrate. Cadman knew too much to
hoot at Skag's dilemma. The more a man knows, the more he can believe.

"It would be easier with a cobra than a constrictor," Cadman had said.
"You'd have to strike just the right key, son. This is what I mean:
The wireless instruments of the Swastika Line answer to one pitch; the
ships of the Blue Toll to another. . . . But I've seen things
done--yes, I've seen things done in this man's India. . . . I saw a
man from one of the little brotherhoods of the Vindhas breathe a nest
of cobras into repose; also I have seen other brothers pass through
places where the deadly little karait is supposed to watch and wait and
turn red-eyed."

The more Skag listened and learned and watched in India, the more he
realised that if he knew all there was to know about the different
orders of holy men, all the rest of knowledge would be included, even
the lore of the jungle animals. He had come into his own considerable
awe through what he had seen in the forest with the priests of Hanuman,
but things-to-learn stretched away and away before him like range upon
range of High Himalaya.


Malcolm M'Cord was the best rifle-shot in India. The natives called
him Hand-of-a-God. As usual they meant a lot more than a mere
decoration. M'Cord was one of the big master mechanics--especially
serving Indian Government in engine building--a Scot nearing fifty now.
For many years he had answered the cries of the natives for help
against the destroyers of human life. Sometimes it was a mugger,
sometimes a cobra, a cheetah, often a man-eating tiger that terrorised
the countryside. There are many sizeable Indian villages where there
is not a single rifle or short piece in the place; repeated instances
where one pampered beast has taken his tolls of cattle and children of
men, for several years.

The natives are slow to take life of any creature. They are suspicious
toward anyone who does it thoughtlessly, or for pastime; but the Hindu
also believes that one is within the equity of preservation in doing
away with those ravagers that learn to hunt men.

In the early days M'Cord began to take the famous shoot trophies. Time
came when this sort of thing was no longer a gamesome event, but a
foregone conclusion. His rifle work was a revelation of genius--like
the work of a prodigious young pianist or billiardist in the midst of
mere natural excellence.

He had wearied of the game-bag end of shooting, even before his prowess
in the tournaments became a bore. . . . So there was only the big
philanthropy left. The silent steady Scot gave himself more and more
to this work for the hunted villagers as the years went on. It
sufficed. Many a man has stopped riding or walking for mere exercise,
but joyously, and with much profit, taken it up again as a means to get
somewhere.

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