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The fifteen stories in this book are laid in the Far East-India, Indo-China, and China, the Indies of the geographers. Sexual love is the motif of most of them, and a factor in all except one. One editor called them “Once Upon a Time” stories—meaning that they could well begin with that olden-day appeal to the imagination, since they are essentially timeless, and deal with strange, romantic events and adventures rather than with everyday life.

On each story I have made a brief comment in the light of its history. In ten of the fifteen tales I did not find any insincerity; in the other five there are no contrivances illegitimate to the ancient art. It seems to me that six or seven represent my best short-story telling, and two may be somewhat better.

The first story in the book was dreamed up and written down in a tent in the tiger jungles of Assam, India. On the homeward journey I read it aloud to the assembled passengers—we were only about sixty on a President liner—and offered a prize of a Bhutanese rug for the best title. Jimmy Thatch, a young naval officer who has since become world-famous for the invention of flying tactics, won the prize with the title “The Lady and the Tigress,” cleverly paraphrasing the well-known title by Stockton.

Jimmy Thatch was impressive even in those days, and I was flattered by the title’s linking the story with the Stockton novelty. Actually another title, proposed by a Californian whose name I have forgotten, was a better fit. He suggested “The Closed Trophy Room,” and as such the story has been rechristened. If the namer will make himself known, I will send him a prize.

Four of us were sitting around the fireplace at the University Club in one of the fashionable fruit-growing colonies of the Northwest. We often had good talk there—our fellows were a knowledgeable lot, and they had come from the four quarters of the country in the years of the big land boom—and tonight it was special.

“The old doc,” as we called him, had just made the point that an astonishing number of the great captains in history had been pint-sized men, frail or physically unimposing. He mentioned for example Napoleon, and Lord Nelson.

“An able leader who is big and manly looking can win the trust and devotion of his men,” the old doc said, “but if he happens to be a shrimp, or a delicate chap with a limp or some other frailty, he is simply worshipped. He appeals to his men’s chivalry, I suppose—anyway, to their innate sense of dramatic contrast.”

“By and large,” Colonel Shawburn assented, “the small man will go further than the large man, talents being equal, in civilized countries. And after all, it’s only natural.”

“Why is it only natural?” I asked.

The colonel adjusted his pince-nez and examined me curiously. “It should be obvious. The big, burly fellow grows up too easygoing. He feels no need to assert his virility or display his courage—it is taken for granted. The little guy of the right stuff carries a chip on his shoulder. And that reminds me of my friend Johnson, whom I knew in Des Moines. Well, well, Johnson! A good case in point.”

We said nothing—only waited. We knew the colonel.

“It’s a very curious story,” the colonel went on thoughtfully.

We lighted our pipes and crossed our legs. “Shoot,” the old doc invited, speaking for us all.

Yes, it was a curious story. And although many of the conversations were doubtless the colonel’s own invention—he could not have had a dictaphone under Johnson’s table—they seemed to us in character; and we all felt that in the larger sense, at least, the tale was true.

Johnson returned from his single year at the University of Iowa in 1889. (So the colonel related.) He was definitely one of your shrimps. Although he wore thick-soled shoes—for economy and to prevent colds, so he explained—the most he ever claimed was five feet six.

I should like you to note especially those thick-soled shoes. Nothing could be more typical of Johnson, and they play a part all through his story. It is a fact that he never allowed anyone to see him without them, scarcely even his wife. He never wore bedroom slippers; and to me there is something not merely pathetic but heroic—and the two words bear a curious relationship—in the way he wore that heavy footgear from pajamas to pajamas every day of his life. By that fact alone we might have known he was destined for great things.

His first name was Harold. Now, no Englishman could imagine why this should be a handicap, but you and I know it was, and Harold knew too. It is part of our inexplicable American tradition that the name Harold, when worn by a small, insignificant-looking man, is mildly comic.

An even greater handicap was that Johnson had been born on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. You know what that means, in a growing country town with the crude beginnings of a social consciousness. There was one person who never let him forget his handicap; on her, unfortunately, we must dwell later.

Looking and feeling insignificant, Harold Johnson went after the biggest game in town. First he got a job with a contracting firm—Des Moines was booming those days. Next he joined the Masons and the Knights of Pythias, and got himself nominated, in spite of general resentment, to the Revellers, the principal social club. Well, in five years he was in business for himself—he had a flair for anticipating good residence districts and putting up dignified houses—he was Junior Warden of the Masons, Doorkeeper of the Knights and on the finance committee of the Revellers.

At the Revellers he met Dorothy Moreland, the banker’s daughter. She too was small—five feet three, perhaps—but she flaunted her smallness: called herself “little me,” dressed like a child, and snuggled up to dance with the tallest youths in town. Naturally, she didn’t have much time for runty little Harold. Yet in the year 1895 she married him.

No, she did not love him. I don’t think she was ever decent enough to pretend that she did. She was head over heels in love with an adventurous young blade named Ashcroft, but he married another girl, and anyway, she was headed for the shelf. Half for spite, half for bread and butter, she took little Harold Johnson for better or worse.

For him, it was definitely worse. It is hard to account for such an odious creature as Dorothy Johnson. Yes, a fine housekeeper. She was such a good housekeeper that she wouldn’t let Harold smoke cigars in the best room—and Harold loved to smoke cigars, because they made him feel masculine. She was active in club work, had a kind of brutal honesty, dressed well, and was cultured in that unspeakable nose-tilted fashion that invariably spells a puny mind.

On the other hand, her vices were so appalling that I shudder to relate them. It is not enough to tell you that as soon as she married Harold she began to wear high heels! Besides, she was always throwing up to him his humble birth, reminding him of her condescension in marrying him and making light of—bringing to the light—all his innocent little pretensions.

Among his other gestures—perhaps the most touching of the lot—Harold was a big-game hunter. He began with a fortnight’s deer hunt in Minnesota, and as time went on, took longer and more ambitious trips until he had shot moose and caribou in eastern Canada. I won’t say that Harold did not enjoy the woods. At least they were an escape from Dorothy. But the hardship and solitude he endured, for a little extra self-respect and a few moth-eaten heads!

But do you think Dorothy would give him a word of appreciation? Never. She belittled the whole business: accused him in company—pretending to be joking, in that inhuman way you’ve all experienced—of faking his photographs and buying his skins and horns. She wouldn’t let him tell his hunting yarns to their dinner guests. She wouldn’t even let him hang his trophies in the front room, but banished them to the attic.

“I won’t have them here, collecting dust and breeding moths,” she declared once and for all. “Besides, I don’t want to be reminded of your silly imitation of a ‘strong silent man of the open spaces.’ You’re not another Stan Ashcroft, you know, to hunt tigers instead of tame cows, and stick wild boars from horseback with a lance.” (It was just like her to say “lance” when any decent creature would have said “spear.”)

Yet her words gave Harold his biggest idea. Spearing wild boars was definitely out of the question—Harold could not manage horses—but he might conceivably shoot a tiger! He was paralyzed at the very thought of a tiger, but such was the stout heart in his narrow chest that this made him dream about it all the more. And if he brought home a fine tiger skin, Dorothy would let him keep it in the parlor!

But a tiger hunt in India would cost four thousand dollars, a fourth of his year’s income. Dorothy would never hear of his spending such a sum. Then suddenly the chance came to make his dream come true.

It was in the fall of 1919, in the last days of war prosperity; Harold was just fifty years old. He came home this September night with a glitter in his eye.

He said nothing of his great scheme until dinner was over. “Sweet,” he began adroitly, then, “you spoke of a new fur coat this winter. Well, a little windfall came to me today, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t blow it.”

“You have everything you need——” Dorothy began self-righteously. But Harold interrupted her.

“Well, I know a thing or two I’d like to buy. I thought at first of sending this windfall to my brother Will—he needs it, heaven knows—but if you’d rather, we’ll split it, and each of us spend our share exactly as we wish.”

“What is it you want? I’ll spend my share on necessities, and it isn’t fair——”

The splendor of Harold’s dream strengthened his spine and steadied his voice. “On second thought, I think we ought to send it to Will. He’s having a tough time with that mortgage.”

It happened that Brother Will was a sore subject with Dorothy. A happy-go-lucky, almost illiterate man, still he was Harold’s boyhood idol and his very own. He was forever helping him, and Dorothy could not prevent it. On this point, if no other, little Harold always stood his ground. So she tacked quickly.

“I suppose you deserve a little extravagance,” she said, as graciously as she could manage. “How much did you get?”

“Then it’s agreed—fifty-fifty, and no complaints on either side?”

“It’s not fair, but I agree.”

“It’s a right sizish little amount. As a matter of fact, I got an offer for that paper-mill stock that I’d thrown into our deposit box and kissed good-by. I realized”—and Harold gulped but went on gamely—“ten thousand dollars.”

“Ten thousand—dollars! And you mean to tell me you’re going to spend half of it on your selfish pleasures? May I ask how?”

“Why, that’s simple. I’m sure you’ll agree with me, my dear, that I need a vacation, and the boys can handle the office perfectly well.”

“Continue, please.”

Harold rose to his feet. He always felt stronger when those thick-soled shoes were solid beneath him. And it is forever testimony to the innate valor of the man that he looked her straight in the eye.

“I’m going to India and shoot a Royal Bengal tiger, and that—that’s a fact.”

Harold Johnson never enjoyed anything in his life as much as his preparations for his tiger hunt. First there were letters to travel agencies in India, and then, as the time grew short, hurry-up cablegrams at five dollars each. Camera films with “tropical packing” written plainly on the package! Antivenom in glass tubes for cobra bites, and a new skinning knife, with a clever verse attached, from the boys at the office. Last but not least, a rifle, very flat trajectory but with a muzzle impact of a clean five thousand pounds, a long bolt which if half thrown might jam the cartridge, but perfectly positive if handled cooly; in other words, as Harold explained to his bright-eyed friends, just the medical specific for a charging tiger.

But oh, Lord, how he hoped no tiger would ever charge him!

There was a full column in the leading Des Moines newspaper about Harold’s proposed trip. It showed his picture, with the new sun helmet on his head and the new rifle tucked under his arm. But when he finally arrived in Calcutta to meet his outfitter, the latter’s eyes must have opened very wide.

In writing to the agency, it seems that Harold had styled himself an experienced big-game hunter; the agent had taken him at his word and planned an expedition that would give his money’s worth to the toughest old Nimrod in the game.

I should have liked to see that agent’s face at the first sight of Harold. Even more should I have liked to see Harold’s face when he heard what awaited him.

“I wanted to give you something new and different, Mr. Johnson,” the agent said, “but—but I’m not sure you’ll approve. If not, I can take you to the Central Provinces. There’s good shooting there, comfortable resthouses, and no doubt you’d get your bag with less trouble than on the big trip.”

“What is the big trip?” Harold asked stanchly.

“Well, it’s to Northeast India—the Sadiya Frontier Tract. There’s been no trouble with the Abors and Mishmis—they’re the hill tribes—for some years, and the government has opened for shikar some forest reserves just inside the Inner Line. You see, on the frontier there’s an inner line, where anyone can go, and an outer line, the extreme limit of British territory, the country between not being policed or fortified. There’s some fine tigers there, big fellows, bison and water buffalo. But it’s wild rough country, human sacrifice and head-hunting within a hundred miles, and if you’d like a little more civilized——”

But Harold was just as game, just as proud, with strangers as with friends. He gulped and said: “Of course we’ll take the big trip. That’s what I’m here for. The more excitement the better.”

But the agent had definite misgivings. He would, you know, after a first look at Harold. Later in the day he talked it over with his partner.

“I don’t know what we’ve let ourselves in for,” he said. “The Sadiya frontier is littered with tigers, and this man Johnson hardly seems the type. It wouldn’t be good for our business if he’s brought back in a basket. But I’ll give him Kalna Badur as guide, with some secret instructions. Badur is the quickest and steadiest shot in our outfit.”

“And the best timed,” said his partner with a wink.

If you’ll take a map of India, you’ll notice a railroad running north from Calcutta and branching off along the border of Bhutan generally northeast. This was Harold’s route. With him was a Bengali servant, some sort of native cook, and his chief guide and interpreter, Kalna Badur. Badur was mostly Gurkha—with the Sikhs the best stock in India. He and Harold got on well together from the start.

After thirty-six hours on the train from Calcutta, and several more on trucks and ferries, they fetched up at the town of Sadiya, on the Brahmaputra River near the Chinese border. Here they outfitted, and with oxcarts and elephants struck off into the Blue.

I like to picture Harold at this stage of the journey, heading deeper and deeper into the jungle, with tiger and wild elephant tracks at every ford, and an immense shikar elephant between his short legs. When the elephant was easing himself up and down hills—maybe you know how they pitch and roll on broken ground—Harold balanced himself with all the sangfroid he could muster, held on secretly with one hand, and wished that Dorothy could see him.

In the meantime they had picked up a whole native village, to work as trackers and coolies. These people were Mishmi stock, tame compared with their wild brethren in the hills, but as wild as March hares just the same. They belonged to the jungle—little, dark people, armed with bows and spears—and the jungle looked out of their eyes.

In the outfit was a girl, the headman’s daughter, whom Harold noticed at first casually, then with a queer uneasy interest. She was about fifteen, which means a mature woman among the plains tribes, but in the hills still a young girl. She had been to a mission school in Sadiya, and spoke understandable English in that funny, chirping way that North Indian travelers know.

“Gud m’rneeng, Sahib,” she would say, when he passed her in camp; and once when Badur was out scouting, he made use of her as an interpreter.

I wish I could trace for you all the stages of Harold’s interest in the girl, and all his thoughts. At first he was principally impressed by the fact that she walked around camp, utterly unconcerned, with bared breasts. But after all, Harold argued, why not? Every people had its own idea of modesty. And the breasts of a young girl were one of her most beautiful features! All artists and such people of discernment knew this fact.

Although he had his tigers to consider, from time to time Cheetal—he soon learned her name—kept stealing into his thoughts, and always with a vague quickening of his pulse. She had a quick smile with flashing teeth, a childlike smile, but her face in repose had a pensive cast, a quick and lovely slope from cheekbones to chin that somehow suggested those marvelous faces of Buddha from Angkor Vat. And she was supple as pampas grass in the wind. By jingo, there wasn’t a single social leader in Des Moines that wouldn’t have envied her carriage—her head thrown up and back from carrying loads!

At night Harold liked to stroll over to his followers’ campfire, mostly to talk to them through his interpreter about their gods and devils, but partly to see Cheetal’s dusky face and naked upper body in the light from the blaze. She would get instantly to her feet with a quick clasp of her hands to her forehead, but he beckoned her back to her place. And afterwards it pleased him to lie in his tent and hear the murmur of her voice and her chuckling laugh as she sat late with her people, gnawing deer shanks and sucking out marrow.

Although she had been to a mission school, her ideas as to religion were a trifle sketchy. Originally an animist, she had had to make room for the God of the White Men in a pantheon already crowded with gods and demons. Most of her gods were a dangerous and malignant lot, and she was childishly pleased that the Father and Maharaja of all the gods felt kindly toward her. And she had been profoundly touched by the immortal story of the Star and the Manger. Still, she had managed fairly well. Of course she still employed charms and believed in puja—devil propitiation—and her ideas of right and wrong remained unchanged; yet on the whole the teaching had had a gentling influence on her wild heart.

And again Harold was tolerant. By gosh, he told himself, she had got more out of the Christian religion than many folks he knew!

As the agent had warned him, the country was littered with tigers. Every morning there were fresh tracks by the spring; every night he heard the brutes singing along the trails—a rumbling roar at spaced intervals—mingled with the trumpetings and crashings of wild elephants.

Every day he rode out on his elephant—Badur behind him, the mahout in front—hoping to meet a tiger, praying that he wouldn’t. And in his anxiety he did not notice that although Badur always carried his own rifle carelessly in his lap, his fingers were always near the safety lever.

One morning they were threading their way through a still, dark forest when, with a crash of brush, a large tiger burst from a thicket and loped off through the trees.

“Don’t shoot, Sahib!” Badur called. Of course he was right: it was a practically impossible shot, and Badur had the native habit of saving ammunition. But Harold did shoot. In the excitement of the moment his rifle jumped to his shoulder and went off.

An extraordinary thing happened. You can blame the jungle gods, if you are of a poetical turn of mind, or blind chance; but don’t blame Harold. He had shot absolutely without aiming. It was not a case of subconscious strength, the power-of-the-mind sort of thing: Harold was not that kind of fellow. Yet the tiger turned a somersault and rolled over dead.

The bullet had gone straight through the brute’s breast, the ideal coup de grâce from the old shikari’s standpoint; for you understand that as a rule only a tenderfoot aims for a beast’s head. When Badur climbed down from the elephant and saw the wound, his eyes bulged with amazement.

The tiger was a fine specimen, and just under the skin of his neck was a lump that proved to be an old arrow head. Instantly the mahout identified him as an old cattle-killer that the Mishmi tribesmen had known for years and had tried ineffectually to kill. Harold’s reputation was immediately enormous. No matter what he did from now on, he was a great shikari, for the hill people never forget.

Both the mahout and Badur were in transports of exultation. Would you think Harold shared it? He would have loved to, heaven knows. But although he could fool the two natives, he could not fool himself. He knew that he had fired without aiming and was no more entitled to credit than if the tiger had broken his own neck in flight.

Yet his painful calmness, enforced by his own inward-seeking, only added to Harold’s prestige in the natives’ eyes. Only a pukka Sahib, one of the greatest of all Sahibs, could remain in such a moment so remote and still.

In his excitement—the Gurkhas are an excitable people—Badur made a confession.

“Sahib, hear me! When you first came, I did not know what kind of Sahib you are, nor did those who met you in Calcutta know. They thought that because you are small of size and gentle of speech you might not be able to look Bhag in the face and kill him. So I was told to ride behind you with ready gun, and when you raised your gun to shoot, I was to shoot also, the reports sounding as one, and throw out my empty shell in secret. But when Bhag ran off through the trees, I did not raise my rifle. I knew there was no use, although I am known as a good shot.

“But now I know you, Sahib,” Badur went on, his Gurkha eyes alight. “No more shall I ride behind you to protect you; it would be as a child who goes to protect his father. I can serve you better by scouting for sign, the hunting grounds of other Bhag, for you to come and kill.”

It was the proper time for Harold to make his own confession. It would be not only honesty but plain common sense. But as always, that cussed pride of his rose and got him into trouble.

“It was a hard shot,” he confessed, with that calm, self-questioning way of a great liar. “I was a little doubtful whether I could make it. But I knew your game, Badur—how you meant to shoot when I did—and I thought I’d try to teach you a little lesson. You may spend your time scouting from now on.”

The celebration in camp that night could almost be called an orgy. There was a tremendous feed of wild hog; there were stone jars of rice spirit—and where they came from, in that jungle, Harold could not imagine. And then a local troubadour sang a long song extolling Harold’s virtues, and the tribe roared, swaying to the chorus, while an old savage set the jungle throbbing with a drum made out of a hollow stump. Harold sat on a camp chair, the savages squatting on the ground around him, and thought how little half the world knows of the other half, and how he himself had never really lived before tonight.

Among those who sat nearest him was little Cheetal. She seemed to take almost a proprietary interest in him. She said very little, but she smiled shyly when he met her eyes, and those eyes mystified him with their dark brilliance. Really beautiful, he told himself. Once he gave her a fatherly pat on the shoulder—I’m afraid he rather invented the provocation—and although the night was chill, her flesh was just as warm as the firelight made it appear.

It stirred him strangely. And still he couldn’t quite get used to her naked breasts. The sight of them gave him a curious disconcerted feeling, a kind of vague regret.

She was just a savage, for all her childish English and her infantile Christianity. The wild, strange perfume of the jungle hung over her. Her little feet tucked under her were gray with ashes and thorn scars—wiry little feet with lively toes. But, by jingo, she didn’t wear high heels!

After the feed was over and the people had cleared out to their grass huts, Badur lingered a moment.

“Sahib,” he began, “do you like the little girl, Cheetal?”

Harold found himself sitting very still, a singular excitement stealing over him. “She’s a nice little thing,” he admitted. “I take an—er—fatherly interest in her.”

“I was just thinking, Sahib, that if you wish I could send her to your tent. She thinks you are a great Sahib, and you have been kind to her. She would be glad to come.”

“Do you mean”—Harold had trouble steadying his tone—“to give herself to me?”

“That would not be all. She would wash your clothes, sew on your buttons and serve your meals. She would not let the Bengali servant come near your tent. In the end you could give her baksheesh, if you desire—a few silver rupees—but she would be happy with nothing.”

“Oh, I couldn’t consider it.”

“I beg your pardon, Sahib. I meant no harm. Many Sahibs have taken hill girls for their stay in India.”

“Oh, I don’t blame them. I’m not a prude about such things—I know how customs differ in different parts of the world. But I couldn’t consider it. Really I couldn’t.”

“Then good night, Sahib. The Bengali has your bed ready.”

“Wait just a minute. I’m—er—naturally curious about the customs of these people. Suppose the girl did come, wouldn’t she lose the respect of her tribesmen?”

Badur smiled faintly. “If anything, Sahib, she would gain face. There’s no restraint put on the young Mishmi girls, the same as with most hill people. Until they are married they are free to do what they like.”

“That’s very interesting. It is indeed. I must say, I’d never thought about it quite that way. Thank you for telling me, Badur—and—and I’ll let you know later—what I decide.”

“Right, Sahib.”

Harold undressed in a daze. He heard the tigers roaring and the wild elephants trumpeting long after midnight.

And only two days later occurred another hunting incident that affected Harold’s destiny. Just before sundown, he decided to walk up the dry nullah to a water hole, in the hope of shooting a sambar deer for the pot. It was only three hundred yards, and he didn’t want to wait for the mahout to put on the elephant’s pad. One Mishmi boy followed him, carrying his little motion-picture camera and his tea flask.

The sambar deer was there, but it had already been killed. It had been slain by the most terrible hunter in the jungle—and Harold turned the corner of the nullah and ran straight into her: a big tigress, crouching there over her prey.

They were not twenty yards apart. Their eyes met, Harold’s mild blue eyes and the cruel yellow, basilisk eyes of the great cat poised there in all her terrifying beauty, framed against the jungle green.

It was a serious, an intensely dangerous situation. The tigress would probably make off—there were at least three chances in four. But on the fourth chance she would charge—one roaring yellow burst to break the nerve of any but the stoutest hunter.

Harold threw up his gun, his finger feeling for the trigger. If he had fired on his first impulse, I shudder to think of the consequences. He would probably have only wounded the animal, and then she would surely have been on him before he could work his rifle bolt for a second shot.

But Harold held on, gallant little guy that he was. The thought flashed through his mind that he must kill that tiger or be killed, and he checked his desperate impulse to fire blindly, leveled the big rifle and drew down the sights until he looked through them squarely into the brute’s eyes. Then, and not till then, did he press the trigger.

He pressed it: he didn’t pull or jerk it. He did not miss. He could not have missed, with all the power of his heart and soul thrown into that second of aiming. The beast collapsed without a quiver. He would have shot again, to make sure, but the Mishmi boy stopped him. The tigress was dead.

Harold tried to keep cool. He had read of tiger hunters who opened their cigarette cases and lighted smokes without a tremor of their hands. But when he tried the trick on a cigar, the match broke and the wrapper all came off.

They had heard the shot in camp, and the whole outfit moved up in a body, little Cheetal included. The Mishmi boy told and acted out the story, while the little savages gasped and laughed and looked at Harold with that bright-eyed look he had seen so rarely and craved so profoundly. He stood silently in their midst, his lips curled in a fatherly smile such as he thought was proper for a truly pukka Sahib.

Harold had in his bag a few bottles of rum. Knowing Harold, you would have known it would be rum, not whisky, and he would have preferred grog if he had known what it was or how to get it. Every night he took a peg—rum’s very bracing, you know—and tonight he took a peg and a half. Then he ate a good thick venison steak, and called in a loud voice for Badur.

“Yes, Sahib?”

“Badur, I’m a little tired, and am going to my tent.”

“Yes, Sahib.”

“And you may send Cheetal there, if she wants to come.” He poured his nerve into it, and his voice held steady. And then, with a reactionary shiver and excusable human frailty: “I think I’d like to have a little chat with her, anyway.”

Harold went into his tent and sat down on his cot. Even now, he did not believe it. He could not realize that it was actually he, Harold Johnson, waiting here to keep an illicit assignation with a lady.

She wouldn’t come. He didn’t even want her to—but his bursting heart told him he lied. Anyway, she wouldn’t come.

But she did come. He saw the firelight on her dusky skin, and then the flash of her white teeth as she smiled.

“You send for me, Sahib?” she asked, in her best English.

“Well—that is—yes, I did, as a matter of fact. Come in, won’t you? We’ll have a little chat.”

She was not in the least embarrassed. They take life simply, you know, they who war with realities. She fastened the strings of his tent door, tidied up his table and turned up the wick of his lantern, then with a faint smile took the seat he offered her beside him.

He talked to her nervously a few minutes. He asked inane questions about her life, her schooling, her beliefs and customs. Meanwhile, fifty years’ conditioning was making a last frantic effort to save him, or defeat him—whichever way you happen to regard it. She was not a white girl. Her skin was definitely brown. Yet when she gave him again that dim little friendly smile, some last tether snapped within him, and lifting her dark face, he kissed her on the lips.

His first sensation was of incredible astonishment. He had forgotten that a kiss could be so meaningful, so utterly sweet.

“Cheetal?”

“Sahib!”

“Would you like to stay with me, and be my girl, the rest of the trip?”

“Bas.” She had forgotten her English.

“It won’t make you any trouble? You won’t be sorry afterward?”

“No, Sahib. I be glad.”

“You know I’m going away, back to America, in a few weeks—and—and I’d have to leave you here.”

“Bas.”

“And there is a mem-sahib at home.” It was true; he had almost forgotten.

“Bas. But it is a long way, Sahib, where the sun sets.”

Yes, it was a long way, another world.

He was very gentle with little Cheetal. She had not dreamed that a man who could face Bhag and kill him could be so. And he was her first love!

The Bengali servant did not come to Harold’s tent again. Little Cheetal would not stand for it. She alone repaired the thorn tears in his shirts, sewed on his missing buttons and washed his clothes.

She kept track of all his outfit, held his soap and towels when he washed his face and even resented Badur’s cleaning his big tiger gun. But she wouldn’t insult him by eating with him. When he urged her, she smiled and shook her head, and sat in the corner of the tent with her back turned. And she made her bed on the tent floor, below his cot at his feet.

Harold remembered afterward her every favor, almost every word and gesture, and especially he remembered the delicate little half turn of her head, her chin thrown up toward her right shoulder, which was her assent to any request or command. What he did not remember was his own thoughts, his own mental reaction to the extraordinary thing that was happening to him.

I think he was unable to view it as his own experience. It was more like something he had read or dreamed. He was only aware of a deep-flowing happiness that abided with him day and night, that was there waiting for him whenever he turned to it, that filled the intervals between one immediate interest and another. Sometimes at night he would waken, listen a startled moment to her peaceful breathing at his feet, then drift with a sense of utter well-being into sleep.

This and no more was enough, heaven knew. Nothing more need ever happen to him. But something did happen, something unforeseen and out of bounds.

Harold had earned his tiger skin. He had won Cheetal. But this other thing seemed simply the tribute that the gods pay to those who defy them.

Beyond the hills, in a trackless region of steep-cut ridges and broken narrow gullies, lived the wild Abors, a persistent thorn in the flesh of the British government. They had raided to the inner line two years before, murdered and burned, and scampered back to their mountain strongholds, but the British had sent a punitive expedition, killed their leader, burned their thatch and laid waste their crops, and supposed they had been taught a lesson they would remember for thirty years. Otherwise, of course, Harold would not have been permitted to penetrate the country.

But the British had failed to reckon on the deepest tribal instinct of the Abors, which is revenge. As blood feudists, our own Kentucky mountaineers are meek and mild in comparison. The Abors had determined to kill the first English Sahib they could get their hands on.

In some fashion they got word of Harold’s hunting trip. Their oracles and priestly hocus-pocus told them that the time was auspicious for a raid. Of course it never entered their heads that Harold might not be an Englishman; no doubt they thought that all white men were English. So one night they came stealing out of their steep, dark ravines, with spears and knives and poisoned arrows.

It was about eight o’clock on a pitch-dark night. Badur had not yet returned from a scouting trip; Harold had just finished dinner and was sitting on a camp stool by the fire. His loaded rifle was leaning within reach, but all his extra ammunition was in the lock box in his tent.

Suddenly there was a humming sound, a wicked, deadly hiss, and something streaked by Harold’s cheek. It was a poisoned arrow, and he distinctly saw it plunge into a tree beyond the campfire.

The next instant pandemonium, as Harold used to put it, broke loose. There was a volley of unearthly yells and howls, just at the edge of the firelight, and then a barrage of arrows and spears. How they all missed him he cannot understand. Very modestly he ascribes it to chance. But I think they missed him partly for the same reason that an amateur sportsman is likely to miss a tiger, no matter how short the range. To the wild Abors, little Harold was dangerous game.

True, this Sahib, as they saw him through rifts in the firelit leaves, was not so large as the men who marched in line to burn their thatch, not much larger than themselves, but he sat very straight and looked quite fierce. And when the first arrow missed, he snatched up his rifle and began to blaze it at their dodging figures in the dark. It was as swift and terrifying a retaliation as a tiger’s charge.

But there were at least forty of the Abors—and only one of Harold. His men had no weapons except brush knives, so with their wives and children they simply scooted into the cover of darkness at the first Abor yell. The raiders did not pursue them. They wanted the Sahib. But his rapid fire, and quite possibly his yells—I always like to picture Harold standing there, yelling like a red Indian—held them at bay for a few vital seconds.

Harold’s rifle contained five cartridges. He fired them all without a jam. Then he started sprinting toward his tent to get more.

But instantly he saw that the Abors had cut him off. Before him and behind him they were closing in, still warily, but cocking their emotional triggers for a last stabbing, hacking rush. They were to the right of him, too, and to the left, in the pitch-black dark, there was—

There was a sudden low call.

“Sahib! Come, Sahib!”

Harold came. A little hard hand shot out of the dark and clutched his. Then he felt himself running blindly through the thickets, with someone beside him who seemed to see in the dark like a wolf, someone who held fast to his hand and snatched him along.

He didn’t know how far they ran, he and his unseen guide. He did not remember the thorns that ripped his clothes and tore his skin, the logs he was dragged over, the thickets he was yanked through. The next thing he clearly recalled was being haled into a bamboo clump, and then jerked down flat on the earth. He was literally sobbing for breath, but a hand pressed tight over his lips to hold back the sound.

And he remembered clearly the other hand and arm thrown around his neck, pressing him close, as though to protect him from harm.

It seemed hours that they lay there, Harold and Cheetal; probably it was only minutes. On all sides they heard the Abors yelling and beating brush, and saw the flare of their torches under the trees. Once one of the murderous little brutes approached within fifty feet, but together they held Harold’s breath, and he passed on.

When the lights dimmed, they rose and crept on, very softly now. Presently they struck a small stream, and Cheetal made Harold get in and wade. He was too dazed at the time to think why. Cheetal’s naked feet left no prints in the mold of the trail, but Harold was wearing his logger boots with hobnails.

Then, it seemed, they climbed a ridge, tramped for endless miles along its crest and finally dipped down into a brush-grown valley.

“And here, Sahib,” Cheetal told him, “you go sleep.”

He obeyed. He was exhausted. Only dimly he knew that Cheetal sat beside him all that long, chill night, warming him with her body, her hands roaming constantly over his own hands and his face to drive off insects.

In the first gray light she wakened him, and they trudged on. On the way she pulled up a plant with a long yellow root: Harold never was able to learn its species.

“Eat, Sahib,” she said. And he ate.

They traveled until the sun was well up, then paused in a warm, open glade. “Now Cheetal, she sleep,” she told him. “I am so veree tired.”

It seemed quite natural, Harold remembered, for them to be alone there in that illimitable jungle, she curled up asleep, he keeping watch beside her. All she had done for him did not seem strange, either, but just the natural order of things.

Cheetal opened her eyes shortly after noon, and at once sprang to her feet. Without a word she took Harold’s hand, and led him up the ridge and away. All afternoon they tramped, rough country mostly, heartbreaking steeps and painful descents, and camped at sunset on the edge of a small lake.

Camped! They had nothing to camp with. If you imagine the subtropic jungle as an Enoch Arden island of luscious fruits and mighty nuts you are on the wrong track. All afternoon Cheetal’s eyes were darting, but the bitter jungle fruits were green, and all she had found was a handful of roots, not half enough for a meal.

She laid them at Harold’s feet, her hands clasped at her forehead, but he shook his head and divided them.

“It’s fifty-fifty from now on, Cheetal,” he told her. And this was the nearest they ever came to a marriage vow.

That night they risked a small fire—the wood was green; there was no ax to cut it with, only Harold’s skinning knife, and Cheetal’s wood-skill and patience alone kept it burning. He would never forget how she crouched over it, blowing at it with pursed lips, and making little whistling sounds as she inhaled, its meager light meanwhile burnishing her bared breast and arms.

“But no boil water,” she told him sadly. “No pot, no boil.”

For she remembered that all his drinking water, and even the water he used for the little brush for his teeth, must be boiled. For some reason beyond her ken, uncooked water was bad for Sahibs.

When he lay down to sleep, he made Cheetal lie opposite the fire, so she could have her share of warmth in that piercing mountain chill. But as he was drifting off, too tired to protest further, he felt her lie beside him and press him close. All night he slept with the fire on one side, Cheetal’s loving warmth on the other.

Four days more they wandered through the jungle, an adventure in its way as heroic as the ten years’ journey of Ulysses. On the morning of the fifth day they struck a man-made trail. Three hours later they saw a military telephone line, and followed it down. And in mid-afternoon they came up to a remote outpost of British law, garrisoned by native troops.

The native sergeant turned out the guard at the sight of a Sahib; and Harold managed to raise his arm in what he fancied was a snappy military salute. And the next thing he remembers clearly was jolting along in a government lorry, headed for the town of Sadiya.

It was the end of Harold’s great adventure, but not the end of his story.

He did not return to camp. Government officials had already visited it and searched in vain for Harold’s belongings. Not only his tiger skins, but his cameras and every other article he possessed had been taken by the raiders. All of Cheetal’s tribe who had escaped the attack had gone to Sadiya for protection, and here it was that Harold said good-by to her.

He called her outside the native rest-house. It was dusk; the snow peaks of Tibet were vast dark shapes against the graying sky. To all that he told her—and I doubt that either of them knew quite what he was saying—she touched her hands to her forehead in acknowledgment.

She was not crying. It was not fitting that a Mishmi handmaiden should show pain before her lord. Her eyes looked only very large and dark. And very simply she accepted the thousand-rupee note that he gave her. She had never seen even a fifty-rupee note before.

“But I hardly need it now,” she told him forlornly. “I have prayed to the God Jesus—and did what was needful that the old gods be not offended—but my prayer was not answered.”

“Do you mean,” he faltered, “th-that you really wanted——”

“Sahib?”

“I see. I beg your pardon, Cheetal. I didn’t understand.”

“But I shall give Sahib’s gift to the Political Officer Sahib to keep for me,” she told him in her quaint-sounding English. “And when some village chief, old and toothless, offers my father many cattle and some silver to buy me, I can pay the dower price and be free.”

“But you’ll marry sometime, Cheetal. Some young man of your own people——”

“It may be so, Sahib. There is no law among us forbidding a widow to marry. It may be, after many moons and many rains, that the aching heart will ease a little, and the tears dry, and the arms cease to grope in the darkness. But no father of my sons can ever make me forget one of Sahib’s smiles, or his least careless word, or one touch of his lips.”

“But we won’t say good-by forever. I’ll come back in a year or two and see you again.”

“No, Sahib.”

“You don’t want me to come?”

“No, Sahib.” The fingers of her little dark hands met on her forehead in entreaty.

“Why not, Cheetal?”

“Sahib is going back to his own land. The moon has reached the full and begun to wane. It is another world, where the sun sets; it is too long a road for Sahib’s tired feet. And besides, I could not bear——”

“What is it?”

“I am not a mem-sahib. We women of the jungle grow old quickly. It is not fitting that my lord should see me then. I would want him to remember me as I was when I found favor in his eyes.”

Harold did not pursue the point. He did not wholly understand, but he felt something deep and strange which must have been akin to awe... And then she began talking about his shirts.

She had repaired the tears in his khaki shirt, but a button was missing from the cuff of the white shirt, the one that Sahib had bought only two days before at the bazaar, and she had not been able to match it. This must be left to the Bengali—and her little brown nose wrinkled in disdain—who would go with Sahib on the T-rain. And Sahib’s soap was to be found in the little pocket of his new handbag.

“And Sahib will remember to take the quinine that Doctor Sahib ordered?”

“Yes, Cheetal.”

“And he will not walk bareheaded in the sun on the station platform?”

“No, Cheetal.”

“And the blister on Sahib’s foot? Will he make his handmaidens on the great ship wash and tend it every day?”

Harold smiled dimly. “Yes, Cheetal.”

“Then—then,” and her eyes met his, “ ‘you have—my leave—to go.’ ”

Answering the proud, sad little jest, Harold touched his hands to his forehead. “Good-by, Cheetal.”

“Good-by, Sahib, my lord.”

“You—you won’t be sorry—for anything?”

“While water runs and stars shine, I will be glad.”

So he kissed her on the mouth, and went away.

Although until now he had been afraid of the air, Harold crossed India on an air liner and enjoyed the trip. Then he sailed from Bombay.

The story of his escape from Abor raiders, “by the aid of a faithful body servant,” had gone ahead of him by telegraph and cable, so three reporters came to the dock in New York to meet him. They questioned him, looked at him with a startled expression in very bright eyes, and wrote glowing stories about him which their papers printed with his picture.

It was believed, the stories ran, that he had killed from three to six of the Abor raiders. He was a big-game hunter of international reputation. In addition to the raiders, he shot three man-eating Royal Bengal tigers. His heroic body servant was a child of the jungle, and his name was Cheetal.

When Harold’s train drew into the station at Des Moines, the Kiwanis Club was there in a body to meet him. They slapped him on the back, called him an old buzzard and paraded him all the way home. Dorothy, wearing a new mink coat, rode beside him, her nose slightly elevated as though detecting a malodor.

Of course the reflected glory in which she shone only fed the creature’s malice. And the Kiwanians had scarcely left the house before she was back at her old tricks.

“So you lost your three tiger skins, did you?”

It hardly seemed worth his trouble to answer, but his native politeness prevailed. “There were only two. Yes, I lost them. A pity, wasn’t it? The Abors stole them. You know they use tigers’ whiskers for poison. It’s ground up and fed to their enemies, and acts as an irritant on their digestive tracts.”

“How interesting! And your photographs were stolen, too!”

“Yes.”

“So you had a body servant, did you? I should have liked to see you being waited on. Babied you, I suppose.”

“When I was very tired.”

“Probably took off your boots, too. Likely enough rubbed your feet for you.”

A dim smile curled Harold’s lips. “Yes,” he answered, “and warmed them. The nights were quite cold.”

That smile must have given Dorothy a pang, although she couldn’t have understood why. She did realize that her shafts were not going home the way they used to, so she loosed the deadliest she had.

“I suppose you’ve already caught up on all the important news,” she said in her sweetest tones. “All your friends are about as you left them. By the way, I had a note from Stan Ashcroft.”

“Yes?” He sat down, leaving her standing. He was tired from the excitement.

“He has just crossed the mountains of Sumatra on foot, one of the first white men to achieve it, if not the very first. He killed ten or twelve tigers, and single-handed fought and conquered a whole tribe of head-hunters.”

“Well, that’s fine. I sure envy him. Fine fellow, Ashcroft. Let’s get him to come down next summer. I’d sure love to hear him tell about it.”

And Harold spoke with utter sincerity.

Time ran on. By all outward signs, Harold’s world was much the same. He continued to be successful in business; he took such honors as came his way; he had a fair share of friends. He did not talk a great deal about his experiences in India, and with the passing years, his friends forgot what little they knew about them. On the whole, he was singularly cheerful, though Dorothy noticed that he liked to sit alone, gazing into the fire. She did not understand that faraway look in his eyes.

He went on no more big-game hunts. His health was not quite so good as it had been. In 1929, when he was sixty years old, he turned over to his subordinates the practical operation of his business. He was growing a little deaf, a trifle absent-minded, and the sun was not quite so bright.

In the summer of 1934, when Harold had just turned his sixty-fifth birthday, he was walking in an aimless fashion across an intersection in the business district of Des Moines. He stepped out from behind a parked automobile and was struck a glancing blow by a passing truck. Although conscious and in no pain whatever, he was rushed to the hospital.

His friend Doctor Hargrave examined him—and sent for Dorothy. When the two entered his room he seemed to be asleep; actually, he was in a pleasant half-doze. He heard them distinctly, but it was too much trouble to open his eyes.

“More scared than hurt,” Dorothy was saying.

“I wish I could be as certain,” Hargrave answered in a low voice. “If he isn’t hurt any more than he’s scared, he can walk home from this hospital today. Harold never struck me as being the scary kind.”

Harold opened his eyes. At first he looked only at his old friend, the doctor. “No, I’m not hurt,” he said distinctly. “I must confess I’m not scared either. But I am dying.”

Dorothy gave one deep, sharp gasp. “What do you mean, Harold! What are you saying? You’re not dying!”

Harold looked at her for the first time, “Don’t answer me, woman,” he said. He said it perfectly distinctly.

She stood there, her mouth open. Harold eyed her gravely. She did not make a sound.

“I’ve something to tell you,” he went on. “No, you needn’t step out, doctor; there’s no secret about it. Dorothy, you sent my fine white-tailed deer head to the attic.”

Doctor Hargrave may have thought at first that Harold was semi-delirious, but Dorothy knew otherwise. She tried to speak, but no sound came.

“No, don’t speak,” Harold told her so very quietly. “You have no call to speak. And Dorothy, you sent my fifty-four-inch moose head to the attic, too.”

“I’m sorry, Harold.” It was a gasp, not speech.

“You are a trifle late. Just a trifle late. And my Osborn’s caribou, with the rare double eye-guard, went up there, too.”

“Harold!”

But Harold raised himself on his elbow, and Hargrave said afterwards that his eyes burned with an unearthly fire.

“But there was one trophy you didn’t send to the attic,” he went on, his voice ringing. “She was in the front room all the time. By God, she was even nearer than that! She was in my heart.”

And these were the last words of Harold Johnson.