JUNGLE 
 
 TALES 
 
 HOWARD 
 
 ANDERSON 
 
 MUSSER
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 HOWARD ANDERSON MUSSER
 
 WHAT KKPT MK FROM FIRING: 
 
 CAN T SAY 
 
 "SAUIH!" UK CRIKD, BKKATH- 
 LESSLY," PERSECUTIONS AGAIN! 
 IN THK HASTAR JfNGI.ES!"
 
 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 Adventures in India 
 
 BY 
 
 HOWARD ANDERSON ,MUSSER 
 
 Illustrated by 
 THOMAS FOGARTY 
 
 NEW XSJT YORK 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
 
 Copyright, 1923, 
 By George H. Doran Company 
 
 Copyright, 1920, 1921, 
 By The Sprague Publishing Company 
 
 JUNGLE TALES. I 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
 
 AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 
 
 TF you were a boy in India 
 -* You would often feel terrified. Tigers, 
 bears, panthers, leopards, and wild boar teem 
 in the jungle, and the Arms Act forbids natives 
 to have firearms. 
 
 You would feel hungry. Millions of Hindus 
 go through life without once having a full stom- 
 ach. 
 
 You would feel hopeless. Out of a thousand 
 Hindus only fifty ever learn to read. Almost 
 all are desperately poor average income, five 
 cents a day. As there is no democracy in India, 
 if you were born low down in the social scale 
 you must remain there. A rigid caste system, 
 centuries old and sanctioned by the Hindu re- 
 ligion, forbids you to rise. 
 
 But perhaps you would not feel at all, as it is 
 more than likely that by this time you would be 
 dead. Because of cholera, plague, smallpox, and 
 famine, to say nothing of unsanitary homes and 
 
 641789
 
 vi AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 
 
 the ravages of wild beasts, fifteen babies out 
 of every sixteen die before they reach the age 
 of two. 
 
 No wonder, then, that Americans gladly go 
 as missionaries to India! They go to carry to 
 the Hindis a new religion. True, the natives 
 are amazingly religious already. For his relig- 
 ion's sake a Hindu will tear out his tongue or 
 pluck out his eye or lie for forty years on a bed 
 of spikes. But his is the religion that maintains 
 the caste system, reserving education and pros- 
 perity for the few and dooming the many to 
 utter misery and degradation. So the American 
 missionary in India is fighting Hinduism with 
 Christianity; he is saving the Hindus from pov- 
 erty, from disease, from ignorance, from hope- 
 lessness, from the crushing tyranny of the caste 
 system. 
 
 There are now 2,500,000 native Christians in 
 India. Their numbers increase with astounding 
 rapidity. Whole villages at a time, the natives 
 are renouncing their heathen faith and their 
 heathen ways and hastening the day when India, 
 now a land of crudest oppression, will become a 
 land of liberty and happiness.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAOB 
 
 I Ganl 13 
 
 II Tigers But Especially Bears .... 35 
 
 III Dahli the Manganese Slave 57 
 
 IV Boys of the India Jungle 81 
 
 V Trapped Among Crocodiles .... 101 
 
 VI BaUia and the Bandit ...... . 123
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 What kept me from firing? ... 7 can't say 
 "Sahib!" he cried, breathlessly, "Persecutions again! 
 
 In the Bastar jungles!" FRONTISPIECE 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I gained on him only with the greatest difficulty . . 64 
 
 I took out a box of matches and put it into Dahli's 
 hand. "Perhaps you "will have to set fire to a 
 house" ............ 64 
 
 I sprang into the water, and plunged headlong toward 
 
 the stalled cart ......... 112 
 
 7 shouted "Look out, man, or you're a goner!" but 
 
 he paid no attention ........ 128 
 
 The wretch sprang at Ballia ....... 128
 
 I: Gam
 
 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 Gani 
 
 T 1 1HERE are times when the jungle turns 
 JL all tawny and dry in the terrific heat, 
 and then may come fires. The jungle aflame is 
 a fearful prospect, more dreaded than cholera 
 or famine or wild beasts or all other deadly 
 plagues of India combined. 
 
 It was during such a time that I received a 
 most alarming message, late one day, from a vil- 
 lage miles and miles off in the depths of the 
 Bastar jungles. Ever since dawn we had swel- 
 tered beneath punkas in our mission bungalow, 
 and when, rather to our surprise, we found our- 
 selves still alive at half -past four in the after- 
 noon, I screwed my courage up to the sticking 
 
 place and ventured out on the veranda, and stood 
 13
 
 14 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 there a moment, gazing across the lawn where 
 our gardener was sprinkling the parched grass 
 in vain efforts to make us comfortable. 
 
 I felt weak and ill and generally worthless, 
 and if you had told me I was about to launch out 
 upon adventures leading up to the thrill of a 
 lifetime, I should have heard you through list- 
 lessly and yawned. 
 
 A stone wall, breast high, seemed to quiver 
 in the heat next the road or at any rate when 
 you looked just past the top of that wall every- 
 thing was in motion, dancing and it sickened 
 me, and I was about to step back indoors when, 
 to my astonishment, I beheld a native runner 
 dashing headlong up the road and hailing me 
 with an upraised arm, and I shall never forget 
 the hand a horror-stricken hand, with fingers 
 spread wide apart and hooked, denoting intense 
 excitement. 
 
 My first thought was, "Fires!" My next was, 
 "But why is he coming to me about that?" And 
 then oddly enough, for I had never taken much 
 stock in such rumors, "Is it possible that the 
 stories about a wild man in the jungle are true, 
 and that some of our native Christians have sent
 
 GANI 15 
 
 word to me?'' Queer ideas will pop into one's 
 head late in the afternoon of a desperately hot 
 day in India, and perhaps the heat was what 
 accounted for this one. 
 
 Without waiting to reach my gate, the runner 
 gripped the top of the wall and flung himself 
 over, and there were no salaams from that Hindu 
 as he bounded toward me, his four-fifths naked 
 brown body all glistening with sweat. 
 
 "Sahib!" he cried, breathlessly, "persecutions 
 again! In the Bastar jungles! Houses de- 
 stroyed! Six native Christians savagely beaten 
 up! Four of them dying when the news came! 
 Threats to murder every native Christian there!" 
 
 So it was not fires yet. It had nothing to do 
 with those stories of a wild man in the forest. It 
 was worse. I grew suddenly cold, then hotter 
 than the heat of sizzling India, for you can't be- 
 gin to conceive how precious our native Chris- 
 tians are to a missionary. It is not alone because 
 we have saved them from the barbarous heath- 
 enism that bids Hindus toss babies to sacred 
 crocodiles, and worship venomous cobras in their 
 houses, and collect the scales from smallpox 
 victims and pass them around until every one
 
 16 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 gets the disease, to the glory of Devi, the small- 
 pox goddess. We are doing more freeing them 
 from the awful tyranny of caste. 
 
 For our converts come chiefly from among the 
 Pariahs lowest of the low in the Hindu so- 
 cial order outcasts untouchables. Not long 
 ago the little son of a high-caste Hindu tumbled 
 into a well, and a Pariah who happened to be 
 passing by at the time offered to risk his life 
 in an attempt to get the little boy out. But no ! 
 For a Pariah to save the boy would be a breach 
 of caste and would forever pollute the well; so 
 they let the child die. 
 
 But, once a Pariah becomes a Christian, he 
 puts himself outside the caste system. He can 
 gain an education, and rise, and perhaps win a 
 fairly distinguished position not a few of our 
 converts have done so. And those Christians of 
 ours in the Bastar jungles had a particularly 
 strong hold on my heart, for there were a lot of 
 fine young lads among them, and in India I spe- 
 cialized on boys. 
 
 You understand, now, why I felt as I did 
 when that dripping native runner brought the 
 news. I said to him, "I'm going there at once!"
 
 GANI 17 
 
 He replied, "Sahib, it is a dangerous time to 
 go." 
 
 "I know it," said I. "There may be fires." 
 
 "And the persecutions are terrible, Sahib. 
 You may be murdered," he cried. 
 
 I laughed. For, despite my incurable and en- 
 thusiastic Americanism, I was a chaplain in the 
 British Army, with the rank of captain, and as 
 such could lay a firm hand on matters, granted 
 only that I got there in time. 
 
 I said to the runner, "If you will serve us as 
 guide, we'll be off as soon as I can drum up a 
 squad of our native men and get the bullock carts 
 loaded." 
 
 With a deep salaam, he agreed. (Have I 
 explained that he was a Christian? He was; 
 but one grows so accustomed to meeting Chris- 
 tian natives that it makes no great impression 
 and one easily forgets to emphasize it.) 
 
 I suppose it was because of the heat and my 
 nervous, worn-out condition that, while our 
 preparations were under way, I thought again 
 of the wild man. Only for a moment, however. 
 "A foolish idea!" I said, laughing at myself
 
 18 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 for having entertained such a notion, and dis- 
 missed it. 
 
 Half an hour later we set forth in three lum- 
 bering bullock carts with solid wooden wheels 
 one cart for me, one for my men, and another 
 for our supplies in tin trunks and bumped 
 along, rattlety-bang, over roads where parched 
 tiger grass seven feet high scratched drily 
 against our caravan and roads that ducked be- 
 neath once luscious foliage now bleached a sere 
 yellow and roads that led us among rocks that 
 sizzled in the heat; and what was that, away 
 off yonder a little before nightfall? What in- 
 deed? It looked like a whitish cloud, trailing 
 close to the horizon, but as I watched I thought 
 I could see movement in it a slow, wriggling, 
 ominous, upward swirl. Smoke ! 
 
 It is not swift going, with bullocks we often 
 wish we could use horses, but the deadly climate 
 of India forbids and when night closed in we 
 were not much nearer the cloud. However, we 
 knew its nature, now, for it reddened. "Sahib!" 
 cried an excited voice from the cart ahead of 
 mine. "The jungles off there are ablaze!" Yet 
 no one suggested turning back. No one so much
 
 GANI 19 
 
 as thought of it, though presently we began to 
 sniff the odor of burning leaves, and one of 
 my drivers said, "The wild man had better keep 
 out of there!" 
 
 Ever since the Mutiny, British rule in India 
 has feared a fresh uprising, and that is why the 
 English maintain a system of fine, broad mili- 
 tary roads, so that troops can be concentrated, 
 speedily, where most needed, and before very 
 long we came out upon one of these roads. I was 
 glad. The carts bumped less cruelly, and there 
 was hope of a night's sleep, and if we ran into 
 the thick of a jungle fire, well, at least we should 
 have a wide highway to travel. It sounds in- 
 credible, but I slept all night; and when morn- 
 ing came, and our worn-out bullock drivers 
 handed over their jobs to the set who drove by 
 day, the whole sky above us was yellowish with 
 smoke and the sun was an orange-colored disc, 
 and we could see flames leaping and spurting in 
 the parched forests to left and right of the road, 
 while the heat was insufferable and showers of 
 soot were raining down everywhere. 
 
 I felt exceedingly anxious. The one thing I 
 most wanted was speed, and speed seemed the
 
 20 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 one thing least possible of attainment. The fine 
 road was to our advantage in ordinary circum- 
 stances, we could have hurried along it at a fairly 
 gratifying clip; but, because of the heat from 
 burning jungles, plus the heat from a pitiless 
 sun, I foresaw that we should have to stop at 
 every pool to let the bullocks slake their thirst 
 and the men drench their dhotis, and, while we 
 were making headway so slowly, what would be- 
 come of those persecuted native Christians, and 
 what would become of us? Our supplies would 
 run short. 
 
 Precisely this happened. Early in the morn- 
 ing of the third day, as I lay in my cart with a 
 wet towel around my head and a bit of canvas 
 stretched above it for shelter against the sun, 
 one of my men reached in and pulled my leg. 
 It was not the first time he had pulled my leg, 
 for alas, he was my cook! 
 
 I sat up, and said in Telugu, "Well, Anton, 
 what is it?" and added, jokingly, "Have you seen 
 the wild man?" 
 
 A Hindu with a Portuguese name may seem 
 queer, but Anton's father and mother had per- 
 ished during a great famine, and the boy was
 
 GANI 21 
 
 taken charge of by a missionary who had lived 
 among the Portuguese in South East India. It 
 was there that he got his name, and developed a 
 perfect genius for acquiring languages. He had 
 learned at least seven native tongues Marathi, 
 which is Aryan; Hindi; Hindustani, which is 
 mixed; Gujarathi; Telugu; Koi; and Bengali. 
 
 When I asked why he had pulled my leg, he 
 said, dolefully, "Maja poteawar bhut lagale 
 ahetl" "Hunger has come and sat down on 
 my stomach." 
 
 "And on mine, too," said I, "and it has sat 
 down harder than any wild man could. But be 
 patient and we'll see if we can't scare up some- 
 thing to eat," for I saw a stretch of forest ahead 
 where the flames had not yet swept through, and 
 it was reasonable to assume that any number of 
 wild creatures must have taken refuge there. 
 
 When we came to the still unharmed stretch 
 of woods, I halted our caravan and held up my 
 hand for silence, and the instant our clumsy cart 
 wheels stopped rattling, we heard a telltale snap- 
 ping of twigs, and saw or thought we saw 
 vague forms slinking about furtively in the jun- 
 gle.
 
 22 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 I took down my rifle from its sling (it was 
 too hot to hold by the barrel, so I gripped the 
 stock) and, as I was descending from my cart, 
 Anton called out, "Sahib, I will go into the for- 
 est and try to stalk something perhaps a herd 
 of wild pig," and in he plunged, carrying only 
 a light ax, for natives are forbidden to use fire- 
 arms. 
 
 Now, if there's anything in the world nice and 
 juicy and toothsome, it is a little roasted wild 
 pig. You split him open, clean him, plaster him 
 inside and out with clay, lay him beside a burn- 
 ing log, and wait. By and by you see the mud 
 crack open and down you sit to the most savory 
 meal in Cookland. 
 
 While Anton was thrashing around in the 
 jungle, I ran out in front of our caravan and 
 stood at "ready," with my finger on the trigger 
 itching for a shot. The long road gleamed white 
 and hot ahead. Occasionally I caught sight of 
 a frolicsome monkey or heard a wood pigeon 
 call softly to its mate. I was not nervous. I 
 knew the ways of the jungle of old and had no 
 fear of missing a shot at whatever game Anton 
 stirred up. A wild animal will rush through
 
 GANI 23 
 
 the underbrush to the edge of the road and then 
 stop and poke its head out to make sure that the 
 coast is clear before crossing. Then is the mo- 
 ment to let drive. It is an easy shot ; only, you 
 must be quick. 
 
 Anton had gone quite a distance back into 
 the forest, and I began to get a little anxious 
 about him, for those woods were a perfect tangle 
 of drooping boughs, snarled creepers, and dry, 
 crisp undergrowth, so that, once Anton had put 
 a few yards of jungle between us, he was entirely 
 lost to view. And I knew by the continued snap- 
 ping of twigs that he was not alone in there. 
 Suppose a tiger should spring upon him or a 
 black panther. Or suppose a bear should come 
 swaggering with savage paw upraised, to tear 
 his face right off ; it is a way bears have in India. 
 
 I was in the midst of these worries when, 
 "Suur ate hai!" he cried "The wild pig are 
 coming!" and at any rate something was. It 
 dashed through the leaves and tangled vines and 
 grass, and, without a pause for safety's sake, 
 hurled itself out at one bound. What kept me 
 from firing? Perplexity? Inquisitiveness? A 
 desire to discover what species of jungle beast
 
 24 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 could behave like that? I can't say, but I soon 
 saw that, had I fired, I should have killed, not 
 a little wild pig, but a little naked wild boy about 
 six years old the cause of all those rumors. 
 
 I dropped ray rifle. For a moment I gazed at 
 him, spellbound. He was running on all fours 
 like an animal. 
 
 He halted and rose up from his running pos- 
 ture, and looked first at me and then at the for- 
 est, and, while the shock of amazement still 
 numbed me, flung himself back into the jungle. 
 
 For half a second I thought I must have been 
 out of my head and "seeing things," but there 
 went up a great shout from my men in the wait- 
 ing carts, and I realized that they, too, had seen 
 it. 
 
 But now, on top of the horrible experience of 
 coming so near killing a little boy, came the 
 misery of having him get away. I had a boy of 
 my own, safe and sound at home, and knew only 
 too well what it would mean if, like this poor, 
 naked waif, he were running wild in the jungle, 
 with fires eating their way nearer and nearer 
 every moment. 
 
 I sprinted for the place where he had sprung
 
 GANI 25 
 
 back into the forest, saw a hole in the dry grass, 
 and plunged in, determined to keep the trail and 
 catch up with him. But a great many wild beasts 
 had broken their way through, leaving trails in 
 every direction, and I was soon at a loss to know 
 which was his. 
 
 Just then Anton shouted, "Sahib! Come 
 quickly! It's a little wild boy!" and I heard a 
 prolonged dry swish of parched undergrowth, 
 and followed the sound, and reached Anton only 
 to find that he, too, had lost the trail. 
 
 I was about to raise a grand hullaballoo and 
 get the men from the caravan to join us in the 
 hunt when, from among the rocks not far ahead, 
 came a queer scratching, scraping sound, and 
 a low whimper. We made for those rocks, and 
 saw, sticking out from between two of them, the 
 bare legs of a little brown boy, who was trying 
 to burrow in there and hide. I grabbed hold of 
 those legs, and pulled, and got him out. 
 
 What a fight he made of it then spitting like 
 a cat, biting a piece out of Anton's leg as big as 
 a half dollar, and clawing me so savagely that 
 I bear the scars to this day ! 
 
 I tore long strips from my shirt and tied his
 
 26 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 hands behind him and bound his ankles together, 
 and, though he struggled like an infant lunatic, 
 caught him up in my arms and carried him to the 
 road, where a fine whoop of applause went up 
 from my men as they came running to get a look 
 at him. 
 
 He was not a beauty. Far from it. He had 
 cross-eyes and a snarled and matted mane of 
 greasy black hair, and the worst temper you can 
 imagine. But, considered purely as a show, he 
 was up to the mark and more. Wild? Oh, 
 splendidly, amazingly wild! When we tried to 
 get him to talk, we found that he had forgotten 
 how. Even his cry was wild a kind of yowl. 
 And, in addition to his other charms, he was a 
 complete mystery. 
 
 I put him in my cart and left Anton to look 
 after him while I went and picked up the rifle 
 with which I had come so near killing the boy. 
 I was in no mood to shoot anything now, and 
 we no longer cared how energetically hunger 
 "sat down on our stomachs." Our one, vivid de- 
 sire was to hurry forward, not only because of 
 those persecuted native Christians, but on ac- 
 count of the little boy we had captured. I went
 
 GANI 27 
 
 back to my cart and clambered in, and away we 
 started. 
 
 Fortunately, we had not a very great distance 
 left to go. Still more fortunately, we soon passed 
 the fires and left them behind us altogether and 
 could breathe freely again; and by midday we 
 came in sight of the village from which the ap- 
 peal for help had reached me, and, sure enough, 
 there were gaps along its edges where the houses 
 of native Christians had been burned by their 
 persecutors. 
 
 "Sahib," cried our guide, the native runner, 
 "let me carry the news of our coming," and, 
 hardly waiting for my assent, dashed away at 
 top speed down the road, and presently disap- 
 peared among the nearer huts ; sooner than you 
 would have imagined possible he emerged, lead- 
 ing a throng of overjoyed Christians. They 
 swarmed around our caravan in a perfect hubbub 
 of delight, and brought us food, arid simply 
 tumbled over one another to pay us homage. But 
 the main attraction, I must confess, was the little 
 wild boy in my cart. 
 
 Gossip travels fast in a Hindu village, and the 
 next I knew, the entire population was out and
 
 28 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 crowding around us, all atingle with inquisitive- 
 ness, and I had just the chance I wanted. I 
 stood up in my cart, and, after explaining how 
 we had caught the wild boy, lit into them good 
 and strong about persecutions. The native 
 Christians had been forbidden to draw water 
 from the village well. All such oppression must 
 stop. Several of them had been beaten up. The 
 outrage must not be repeated. Houses had been 
 burned. Nothing of the kind must happen 
 again. Why? Because I, who said so, was a 
 captain in the British Army. 
 
 It is years, now, since I walloped those natives, 
 and there have been no reports of persecutions in 
 all that while. I give the credit mainly to the 
 little wild boy, to whom I owed the opportunity 
 of dealing with the villagers in a body. 
 
 When I had finished speaking, a wizened old 
 Hindu came up to me, salaamed reverentially, 
 and said, "Sahib, there are people here who think 
 they know who that little wild boy is. Three 
 years ago, a woman who lived in a village not far 
 from ours took her child to the priest and said, 
 'This youngster of mine is cross-eyed. Why is 
 that?' And the priest said, 'The devil is in him.
 
 GANI 29 
 
 Put the child out into the jungle and let him die.' 
 
 "For a long time she refused to obey, but the 
 people of her village taunted her with being a 
 witch and keeping a witch child, and began per- 
 secuting her. No one would enter her house, or 
 sell her anything, or even speak to her; so at last 
 she yielded and put the little fellow out, and he 
 went away into the jungle. 
 
 "He was three years old then, and they say 
 his name was Gani." 
 
 "But where is his mother now?" 
 
 "Dead, Sahib. All his folks are dead. The 
 cholera came, Sahib, and wiped out the entire 
 village even the dogs and cats." 
 
 So this was the story credible enough when 
 you come to think of it. For it is not hard for 
 a boy to get along in the jungle. There is 
 plenty to eat jungle persimmons and mangoes, 
 berries like a long plum and full of seeds, and a 
 kind of tuber that resembles a boiled sweet po- 
 tato and grows on plants that look like May 
 trees, and there are lots of other things besides. 
 Of course some man-eating beast may come 
 sneaking up, any moment, and devour the boy, 
 but man-eating beasts are few as nothing short
 
 30 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 of dire starvation itself tempts a beast to feed on 
 human flesh. That is lucky for the beast. Once 
 a man-eater, always a man-eater, and a short 
 lived man-eater into the bargain, for the animal 
 gets mangy and his teeth fall out, and some other 
 animal soon eats him. 
 
 We took Gani to our Methodist orphanage at 
 Sironcha, eighty-five miles away, and it was a 
 tough time we had of it trying to civilize him. 
 During those three years in the jungle he had 
 not only forgotten how to talk, but had almost 
 forgotten how to walk never stood erect, but 
 went crouching and when we put chothes on 
 him, he angrily tore them all off. 
 
 We quartered him in a storeroom and sawed 
 a hole in the door, and through the hole we 
 splashed water on him for a bath, and tossed in 
 green stuff for him to eat, as he refused cooked 
 food, and one day I reached in and nabbed him 
 and, much to his indignation, cut his hair. 
 
 There were about sixty native lads in our or- 
 phanage and at first they called Gani "the little 
 deaf and dumb boy," but we soon realized that he 
 was not deaf. Even when he was slouching up 
 and down the storeroom like a caged animal and
 
 GANI 31 
 
 seemed utterly wild and brutish, he would stop 
 to listen if he heard singing, and, as the head 
 master had a beautiful singing voice, Gani grew 
 fond of him. But it was two whole years before 
 we could get the little fellow to talk. 
 
 One day Gani found out that he himself could 
 sing. That was the turning point. He began;to 
 grow gentle, and we could see fine possibilities in 
 him, and when once we were able to let him out 
 of his storeroom and throw him in with the other 
 boys, he rapidly got to be like them so much so, 
 in fact, that you would never have guessed from 
 what depths of hideous savagery he had come up. 
 
 Now, when you have snatched a boy out of a 
 plight like Gani's and civilized him, and given 
 him an education, and shown him what Chris- 
 tianity impels people to do, there comes a time 
 when he develops a fierce hatred for the mon- 
 strous heathenism all around and wants to go 
 out and fight it tooth and nail. No wonder! A 
 Hindu priest had ordered Gani turned loose in 
 the jungle, and Hindu priests are ordering as 
 outrageous things done every day. "Down with 
 Hinduism!" became the cry of Gani's heart. 
 
 Fourteen years have gone by since the morning
 
 32 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 I came near shooting Gani in the jungle. He 
 is a man, now and a power. If he possessed a 
 talent for public speaking, I believe he would be 
 hammering at the foundations of Hinduism with 
 a terrible ferocity, but he has a talent ten times 
 as persuasive the talent, that is, for singing. 
 Into the native language we missionaries have 
 put the story of our faith, and set it to music, 
 and in villages where the people would scorn a 
 preacher they can't help welcoming a singer. So 
 from native village to native village goes Gani, 
 and in the evening he gathers a squatting circle 
 of native Christians around him, and outside that 
 circle stands a great multitude of heathen folk, 
 while others congregate on housetops, and there, 
 beneath the velvety deep blue Eastern sky, Gani 
 sings the glowing story that has power to under- 
 mine cruelty and oppression and ignorance and 
 misery and to humanize the degraded and set 
 them free. Among the living forces actuating 
 the landslide toward Christianity in India, there 
 is none more effectual than Gani. 
 
 My blood runs cold when I remember that I 
 almost shot him.
 
 II: Tigers But Especially Bears
 
 II 
 
 Tigers But Especially Bears 
 
 FOR excitement and high thrills, I know of 
 nothing to equal a missionary's life in the 
 jungles of India, where wild beasts roam, at 
 large, and you hear and see them, and they hear 
 and see you and there are encounters that fairly 
 freeze a man's blood chance meetings with 
 tigers, for instance, and especially with bears. 
 Speaking personally and for myself alone, I pre- 
 fer tigers, though I confess that I hate awfully 
 to fight a tiger on the ground. 
 
 Tigers in India are shot mostly from trees. 
 When a native finds a "kill" that is, the body 
 of a man or bullock partly eaten and left for a 
 day or so while the tiger lies by in a lair, the na- 
 tive runs and tells the local authorities. They in 
 their turn notify the nearest Civil Service sahib, 
 who hurries to the spot, builds a nest or machan 
 about twenty feet above the ground in a tree 
 
 35
 
 36 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 close to the kill, clambers up into it, and sits there 
 until the beast comes slouching back for another 
 meal. Then, from his position of entire safety, 
 he pops a rifle at the tiger and calls it sport ! 
 
 If no kill has been found, but a tiger is re- 
 ported lurking about, the Civil Service ban gets 
 a bullock, drives four stakes into the ground, ties 
 the bullock's legs to the stakes, ties his ears shut 
 to make him bawl, and builds a machan in a tree 
 near-by and crawls up into it at dusk. If you 
 are a greenhorn at tiger hunting and go out with 
 a Civil Service man to lure the big brute in this 
 style, you may expect the shock of a lifetime, for 
 when the tiger hears the bullock bawling in the 
 night he comes toward it with great leaps, pur- 
 ring and growling savagely, all his lust for blood 
 aroused, and, with a roar that shakes the forest, 
 charges the bullock, snarling and biting and try- 
 ing to rip it loose. Greenhorns have been known 
 to fall out of the machan from fright yes, act- 
 ually. 
 
 But I was not in India for sport. I had gone 
 there as a missionary to introduce our American 
 idea of faith and straight living in a region as 
 big as Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska and peopled
 
 TIGERS ESPECIALLY BEAKS 37 
 
 with 5,000,000 acutely miserable Hindus, many 
 of whom got their first glimpse of a white man 
 when I looked in on them. However, I have 
 twice come within speaking distance of tigers 
 on foot ! For, although we travel by bullock cart, 
 there is a lot of walking to do, as somebody must 
 trudge ahead with lantern and rifle after dark, 
 and I think I must have walked at least five 
 thousand miles during my ten years in the jun- 
 gle. 
 
 But now and then we strike a smooth stretch 
 of road and one feels a strong temptation to 
 crawl into a cart for a nap. One night I yielded 
 to it, and let a guide with a lantern and a pair of 
 ferocious cudgels take my place out ahead. It 
 was a pitch dark night. Trees overhung the 
 road, the vine-fringed branches grazing the tops 
 of our carts, while tiger grass seven feet high 
 swished against the hubs. We were miles from a 
 village. 
 
 I don't know how long I slept, but I know 
 that I awoke with a jerk at the shout of fl Dekko, 
 sahib, ekmoto weigh nasdik ahe dus foot lam- 
 ha!" "Master, a big tiger ten feet long is near- 
 by!" from Anton, my native Christian servant.
 
 38 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 Seizing my rifle, I sprang out and followed 
 Anton, who ran on ahead with a lantern and 
 showed me a great hole in the grass down low, 
 and, pointing to it excitedly said, "He went in 
 there, sahib!" We were walking along half 
 asleep when we came on him lying there in the 
 road, and the guide said, "Sir, get out of our 
 way!" but the beast made teeth at us. We threw 
 stones and he got up and made more teeth at 
 us and went in there. 
 
 I took a lantern from our guide's trembling 
 hand, and crawled along through the hole in the 
 grass for about fifty feet after the tiger, but si- 
 lence was everywhere, and, realizing that I was 
 doing a foolhardy thing, I returned to my cart, 
 and at dawn we reached our camping place, and 
 when the "dudh walla," or milkman, came past 
 with his brass pots, I asked him if there were any 
 wild animals about. 
 
 "Sir," he replied, "last evening in our village 
 a few miles up the road, there was a happy family 
 in their hut and the father played with his little 
 son. He will never do so again. He went out 
 into the jungle to cut wood, and a great tiger
 
 TIGERS ESPECIALLY BEARS 39 
 
 seized him, and we followed to its lair, and heard 
 the tiger crunching his bones." 
 
 So this clearly was the beast he had en- 
 countered. Gorged with human flesh, he had 
 chosen the road as a quiet place to lie down and 
 digest his first meal before returning for the 
 next. 
 
 Oh, well, failing to catch up with a tiger in 
 India is no great calamity. You will soon meet 
 another. I did. 
 
 Not long afterward, we happened to be travel- 
 ing by daylight through a lonely, dangerous 
 region four days away from a railroad and 
 twenty miles from the nearest village. My cart 
 came last in a caravan of six, heavily loaded with 
 native men, women, and children going to our 
 Methodist district conference at Sironcha. 
 
 Suddenly from far ahead there went up a wild 
 shriek of alarm, audible above the rumbling of 
 the cart wheels, though I could not make out 
 the words. The carts halted abruptly. Again 
 I heard the cry, every syllable now distinct: 
 "Lowker ikerdi ye, sahib! Ek weigh hcu!" 
 "Come quickly, master! Here is a tiger!" 
 
 I was the only man armed, so upon me de-
 
 40 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 volved the duty of driving the creature away. It 
 he were an ordinary tiger, intent only on secur- 
 ing a bullock, he would not be very hard to 
 frighten; but suppose he should turn out to be 
 a man-eater. 
 
 I got down my jungle "cannon," as the natives 
 called it and old, twelve-bore, double-barreled 
 rifle weighting fourteen pounds and, edging my 
 way around the hubs of the carts, came out in 
 front of the foremost one. It was full of yelling 
 men and women, pale from terror, and the bul- 
 locks strained at their yokes trying to get loose, 
 while, a hundred feet away in the middle of the 
 road, crouched a magnificent tiger, looking won- 
 derfully beautiful and fascinating. 
 
 I was not happy. No one enjoys coming face 
 to face with a tiger in the open road, and besides, 
 there was the awful sense of responsibility. If I 
 flinched and showed the white feather or if I let 
 excitement spoil my aim, I should see the work 
 of years undone in an instant. All my hold on 
 those native Christians would vanish, I knew. 
 But I also knew the ways of tigers, and I think 
 you will agree with me that they are not nice 
 ways.
 
 TIGERS ESPECIALLY BEAKS 41 
 
 Unless he is a man-eater, the habit of the beast 
 is to halt a string of carts, crawl up slowly on 
 the head bullocks, stalk them until they go back 
 into their yokes with fear, and then suddenly 
 leap toward them with a mighty bound. When 
 they break loose and rush into the jungle, the 
 tiger singles out the one he wants, and is after 
 it in a flash. If he is a man-eater, he expects the 
 bullocks to overturn the cart in their frenzy and 
 let him select a victim from among the sprawling 
 travelers. 
 
 The great striped brute off yonder was crouch- 
 ing for his spring as I came out in front of our 
 caravan. He had his tail up in the air and 
 crooked at the tip like a railroad signal stopping 
 a train, while on his breast gleamed the snowy- 
 white spot no marksman can miss unless he has 
 a "funk" on. 
 
 I dropped on one knee, aimed straight at the 
 beautiful breast, and, not without a sharp pang 
 of remorse as the tiger caught sight of me, pulled 
 both triggers. Down he lurched into the dust 
 with a roar and then a deep, gurling sound, but 
 with the tip of his tail still aloft, and that was the 
 end of the tiger.
 
 42 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 Out from their carts piled the darkfaced 
 crowd, and joined hands, and danced around 
 him, shouting joyously, "Are baberi dushman 
 margyia!" "Oh, father, our enemy is dead!" 
 They treated him with great indignity now 
 kicked him, twisted his tail, and pulled out his 
 whiskers for souvenirs. I soon had him skinned, 
 and as we started away at top speed to make up 
 for lost time, I thought of the folks back home in 
 America who think missionaries to the Hindus 
 must lead pretty uneventful lives. Whereas, we 
 don't; for there are not only tigers in the jungle, 
 hut bears as well, and, while it is of course a mere 
 matter of taste, I would rather meet a tiger any 
 day than a bear. 
 
 When they stand up on their groggy hind legs 
 the savage, big, black bears of India are as tall 
 as a big brown Hindu, and, while they would 
 rather maul a garden, any time, than eat a man, 
 they have hairtrigger tempers and a mere noth- 
 ing will infuriate them, and then their instinct 
 follows a set rule always. Instead of grappling 
 with you like a grizzly, the big black bear's idea 
 is to lift a huge paw with long, merciless claws, 
 and hit you a downward swipe that tears your
 
 TIGERS ESPECIALLY BEARS 43 
 
 face right off. The natives know this, and have 
 learned how to duck. 
 
 Suppose a bear hears a woodchopper in the 
 jungle hacking at a bamboo, and, on swift, pad- 
 ded feet, charges for the spot. If he is warned 
 in time, the woodchopper falls flat on his face, 
 grips the jungle grass with both hands and 
 hangs on for dear life. After a few vain attempts 
 to turn him over, the bear rakes him down the 
 back ferociously, and lets it go at that. 
 
 Not long ago I set out to visit the industrial 
 village we were maintaining in Central India 
 eighty miles from my mission station, and the 
 way led through jungles swarming with tigers, 
 leopards, wolves, deer, wildcats, wild dogs, and 
 deadly serpents, to say nothing of bears. We 
 arrived late in the evening and my native Chris- 
 tian helpers and I were unloading our three bul- 
 lock carts when suddenly I heard a great hullabal- 
 loo afar .off in the dusk, and there came sounds 
 of snapping twigs and swishing undergrowth, 
 and a group of horror-stricken native men 
 bounded out from the edge of a deep thicket, and 
 ran headlong toward us, and one of them 
 shouted, between gasps for breath, "Bears,
 
 44 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 sahib three enormous big bears! They chased 
 us! And there's a fourth. We saw him!" 
 
 Quite a lot of villagers popped out, and came 
 hurrying up to hear the story, but they took it 
 with very remarkable composure. I thought 
 until, presently, I learned that the bears had 
 come to be more or less of a standing institution. 
 For weeks, the four big brutes had been snoop- 
 ing about the fringes of the village, scaring 
 women and children and occasionally a man and 
 keeping timid folks indoors after sundown, as 
 natives are not allowed to have firearms. 
 
 It was up to me, clearly. These were my peo- 
 ple, and I, being the only man possessed of fire- 
 arms, must protect them. Notice, please, I say 
 "must." It was not a mere case of "ought." If 
 I showed a yellow streak, I should not only be 
 leaving these folks exposed to mortal danger, I 
 should bring contempt upon our vast missionary 
 campaign. 
 
 "Tell me," I said to the men who had just 
 come running up. "Where was it that you saw 
 the bears?" 
 
 "In there, sahib. Beyond the thicket. Out in 
 a great open field."
 
 TIGERS ESPECIALLY BEARS 45 
 
 I seized my rifle, giving an extra one to Anton, 
 and together we plunged through the thicket. It 
 was almost dark by this time, and yet, as we 
 neared the farther edge of the thicket, where 
 trees were wide apart again and we could look 
 out across the field, there, sure enough were the 
 bears, dimly yet only too awesomely visible about 
 three hundred yards away, and we heard them 
 grunting as they ripped up the earth in search of 
 roots and white ants! Whoof ! Whoof ! Whoof ! 
 like that. 
 
 Now, when you hunt one sort of game in 
 India, you must not be too much astonished if 
 another sort hunts you. As we stole ahead, sil- 
 ently as we knew how, toward the clearing, in 
 hope of getting close enough to risk a shot, we 
 passed near a stout palm tree with branches ten 
 or twelve feet long, their tips touching the 
 ground, and in one side of its huge trunk there 
 was a large hole. 
 
 I was ahead and had just gone past the hole 
 when whoop -la ! out thundered a great, blood- 
 thirsty wild boar as high as a table and as thick 
 as a sewing machine. Head down, he came like 
 a shot, butted Anton in the knees, knocked him
 
 46 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 flat, rushed on, whirled, and, with savage tusks 
 out, charged straight at the prostrate body to 
 disembowel it. 
 
 Half stunned by the fall, Anton had let go of 
 his rifle, and I knew I must fire, though I real- 
 ized, even in the midst of my excitement, that I 
 might kill Anton instead of the boar. 
 
 I let drive. Hurrah ! Down flopped six hun- 
 dred pounds of wild boar almost on Anton. 
 But what was this ? To my horror, I heard An- 
 ton groan, "I'm dead! I'm dead!" Had the 
 shot gone through the beast and hit the man? 
 
 It was only fright. Wondrously relieved, I 
 ran and helped Anton up; whereupon he went 
 down on his knees to me, and hugged my legs, 
 and cried, gratefully, "I will never leave you, 
 sahib, no matter what happens. I will never 
 leave you day or night." I little guessed how 
 soon he was to prove his devotion, though I knew 
 from of old that native Christians in India keep 
 their word. They are fidelity itself. We have 
 more than three hundred thousand native Chris- 
 tians in India now, and after ten years' experi- 
 ence I have still to hear of a backslider and this 
 despite persecution that is sometimes all but in-
 
 TIGERS ESPECIALLY BEARS 47 
 
 credible in its barbarity. Really, I can think of 
 nothing more amazing than their splendid loy- 
 alty. 
 
 Of course the shot that laid low the wild boar 
 frightened away the bears, but we tagged along 
 after them, and came to a river bank, and, more 
 by good luck than good wit, succeeded in find- 
 ing the cave where they lived. Forty feet above 
 the water, it had an opening about four feet high, 
 and it ran back in about sixty feet, and in front 
 of it there was a shelf of sticky clay a hundred 
 feet across. The bears slunk into the cave and 
 disappeared. 
 
 Anton and I hallooed at the top of our lungs, 
 and after a while several native men responded 
 and crawled up to the opening of the cave, and 
 one of them agreed to stay and watch, and all 
 through the night he stuck bravely to his post. 
 
 When I returned next morning, he said to 
 me, "There are three bears and a hyena in this 
 cave, sahib." Just then I happened to glance 
 up, and there, at the crest of the hill, stood a 
 huge bear, motionless, as if posing for his pic- 
 ture, looking down at us. But before I could get 
 ready to fire, he bounded away at top speed.
 
 48 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 Though we scrambled up the clayey slope, saw 
 which way be had gone, and pursued for half a 
 mile, he escaped. 
 
 Much disgusted, we went back to the cave and 
 began examining its surroundings, and found 
 evidences that it had been an abode of tigers, 
 leopards, wildcats and bears in turn no two 
 kinds could live there at the same time. Then, 
 leaving the man to watch, we went about our 
 business, and when we returned in the evening 
 he still insisted that there were three bears inside, 
 but was not so sure about the hyena. 
 
 I had a pretty laborious day of it in the village 
 and was unable to revisit the cave until dusk; 
 then Anton and I went and perched on rocks, 
 with rifles ready, close to the entrance, waiting 
 for darkness and hunger to bring out the bears. 
 We could hear the croaking of muggers the 
 great crocodiles of India in the river. As night 
 descended, there came vague sounds of beasts of 
 prey roaming at large in the jungle. Over the 
 hilltop rose a dullish red moon that turned slowly 
 to orange and then yellow, and poured a flood 
 of mellow radiance down the slope. 
 
 The tenants of that cave knew we were there.
 
 TIGERS ESPECIALLY BEAKS 49 
 
 We knew they knew. Beyond question they 
 must have scented us. And, while it was per- 
 haps foolish to suppose that bears' minds work 
 like men's minds, I could not help fancying that 
 the beasts inside had figured out a plan and had 
 rehearsed it, mentally, a hundred times over. To 
 test the truth of this, one would have to be a 
 bear; yet the event seemed to show that I was 
 right, for now, to my surprise, forth ambled not 
 one whoofing bear, but three! 
 
 Because I was surprised at such incredibly 
 good luck, I hesitated, and stared in open- 
 mouthed wonder; and, quick as a flash, all three 
 of them turned and went bounding up the hill- 
 side, a great she-bear leading. 
 
 I fired. Down dropped the leader, roaring 
 horribly, biting everything within reach, and flop- 
 ping over and over, limp and helpless, down the 
 bank all the way to the water's edge with a 
 bullet through her head. The next bear got a 
 shot in the neck and followed, roaring horribly, 
 but dead in a few seconds. The third, a full- 
 grown male bear, changed his plans at this, and 
 galloped back toward the cave. With my rifle 
 at my hip, the way we used to shoot rabbits in
 
 50 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 Ohio when I was a boy, I bored him through, 
 but he crawled on into the cave, badly wounded. 
 
 It would not do to leave him there; he might 
 get well, in course of time, and renew his depre- 
 dations ; so, with help from Anton and the native 
 who had kept watch, I got a lot of brush to fill 
 the side of the cave, and soon we had it blazing, 
 and I shielded my eyes with my hand and peered 
 in. Although it was a crooked cave, I could see 
 far enough into it to make out the cowering 
 form of the beast I had wounded. I was in the 
 act of taking aim at his head so as not to spoil 
 his coat, when there was suddenly a wild com- 
 motion, and, maddened by the smoke, out 
 bounced a monstrous she-bear, her eyes as red as 
 blood. When she passed the burning brush, her 
 fur caught on fire. Up she went on hind legs 
 and came at me with merciless paw lifted high 
 to tear my face off. 
 
 Transfixed with horror, I fell back, lost my 
 footing in the slippery clay, and started to slide 
 down the bank, rifle in hand, with that flaming 
 beast towering over me. My rifle pointed 
 straight up. It was loaded. My finger was on 
 the trigger. But pull? The sensation of slip-
 
 TIGERS ESPECIALLY BEAKS 51 
 
 ping let alone fear simply paralyzed my 
 brain, and pull I could not. 
 
 Then it was that Anton, who "would never 
 leave me day or night," made good superbly. 
 He had been holding the now empty rifle I had 
 used before. Tossing it away, he threw himself 
 on the ground between me and that blazing bear, 
 caught hold of me to prevent my slipping fur- 
 ther, and cried out, "Shoot, sahib! Shoot!" 
 
 I was not conscious of any act of will, but, 
 instantly, I felt my finger pull, and heard the 
 shot, and felt the kick, and caught a mixed odor 
 of gunpowder and burning fur, and dared to 
 look up as I toppled over, scared half dead! 
 With throat torn open, the bear leaped sidewise 
 and went bounding up the hill like a living bon- 
 fire gone crazy. 
 
 I was myself again in a twinkling, and dashed 
 uphill with Anton after the bear. Just then the 
 moon ducked behind a cloud. It made the living 
 bonfire brighter, but fur burns only a short while 
 and by the time we reached the top of the hill no 
 bear was to be seen. 
 
 So back we went to the cave. Though the fire 
 within its entrance still blazed, all was quiet there
 
 52 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 now, and we judged that the wounded bear in- 
 side must have died of his wounds. As for the 
 hyena my congratulations to that lucky beast 
 for having existed only in the imagination of the 
 native who kept watch! When we let the fire die 
 down and explored the cave with torches, all we 
 found was a bear, and a dead bear at that. We 
 hung him on a tree with the others and went 
 home. 
 
 Next morning we returned and searched the 
 hilltop and there, wrapped in a singed coat no 
 longer furry, lay a dead bear. We were glad we 
 had not got too near her when she was dying; 
 in her agony she had chewed bushes, gnawed 
 rocks, torn up the earth, and made a frightful 
 struggle as her lungs gradually filled with blood 
 from her shattered windpipe. 
 
 We skinned the four bears, stretched the skins 
 on the ground, covered them with salt and ashes, 
 and let them dry, while the natives swarmed in 
 from far and near for a grand feast that is evi- 
 dently not forgotten, as I received a letter the 
 other day from the "chaudhri," or headman of 
 the village : "Dear Sahib : There are four more
 
 TIGERS ESPECIALLY BEARS 53 
 
 bears in the cave and they chase our families. 
 Do come back and shoot them!" 
 
 Ever since that message reached me, my trig- 
 ger finger has been itching.
 
 Ill: Dahli the Manganese Slave
 
 Ill 
 
 Dahli the Manganese Slave 
 
 DAHLI, a ten -year -old Hindu boy, 
 drudged in captivity at a manganese mine 
 a long way off from the jungle where "Buffalo 
 Bill," also ten years old, ran wild among the 
 stupid, slatish-blue buffaloes. 
 
 Dahli had never heard of Buffalo Bill, nor 
 had Buffalo Bill heard of Dahli; yet amazing 
 things happened, as you shall see, and it was 
 Dahli's courage that turned Buffalo Bill's young 
 life completely upside down. Not at first, how- 
 ever. It took time. And at the stage when I 
 got into the row I was as unaware of Dahli's ex- 
 istence as of Buffalo Bill's. 
 
 In those days I lived in Nagpur, the cobra 
 city, and one afternoon I happened to be pacing 
 up and down our garden, thinking over the many 
 problems a missionary always has on his mind, 
 
 when, chancing to look up, I saw off yonder in 
 57
 
 58 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 the road a wretched family group a mother, 
 two little girls, a babe in arms, and a son about 
 eighteen years old their plaintive brown faces 
 appearing above our garden wall and their hands 
 outstretched in agonized supplication. 
 
 "Beggars!" I thought at first. But in India 
 the beggars whine a droning cry of "Pisa, sahib ! 
 Pisa, sahib!" and these natives just stood -there, 
 silent, with woebegone faces and with arms 
 stretched out toward me, entreating. 
 
 "What is it all about?" I wondered. "And 
 where is the father?" I soon learned. Running 
 to the garden wall and looking over, I beheld a 
 miserable native crawling on hands and feet 
 with his face to the sky, and his legs were swollen 
 to twice their natural size. 
 
 "Poisoning!" cried the eighteen-year-old boy. 
 "Kali putr! JJ 
 
 Now, "Kali putr" means "blackstone," which 
 means manganese, a very poisonous ore, and, as 
 the nearest manganese mine was twenty-eight 
 miles away, I exclaimed, "Is it possible that you 
 have walked all the way here?" 
 
 Pointing a melancholy finger at the poor fel-
 
 DAHLI THE MANGANESE SLAVE 59 
 
 low on the ground, he said, "Walked and 
 crawled." 
 
 I had no suspicion then that these people knew 
 Dahli. I had never heard of Dahli, myself. But 
 in any case, it was no time for questions about 
 anything. I called my wife and had her take 
 the woman and little children to the women's 
 quarters, and ordered my cart got ready, and as 
 soon as it came, gently lifted the manganese 
 victim into it and hurried him to the hospital, 
 carrying along his son. There I arranged to 
 have the boy boarded while his father was being 
 nursed back to health, and it was from the boy 
 that I got the story. 
 
 "We are high caste Kumbhis," he said, "and 
 we lived on our farms near Khandala" (in the 
 neighborhood where Dahli once lived, if I had 
 known) "and the crops failed, and we were sud- 
 denly very poor, and then came Mehmet Ali, the 
 Mohammedan, and he besought us to go away 
 with him and work in his manganese mine, and, 
 foolishly, two hundred families of us went a 
 thousand people in all. 
 
 "Mehmet Ali promised us big wages and 
 agreed to pay our fare on the train and provide
 
 60 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 us with food for the journey. He kept his word 
 about buying our tickets and furnishing the 
 food, but when we reached the mine he hustled 
 us inside a high stockade of bamboo, with armed 
 guards at all the gates. We were trapped, sahib. 
 Prisoners! Slaves! There he worked us four- 
 teen hours a day and fed us rotten rice and made 
 us sleep out under the stars, and we got no pay 
 at all, as he said we owed him for our railway 
 tickets and food. 
 
 "Farmers are not good at handling poisonous 
 ore. Every little while, someone would get a 
 bad cut, and the wound would fester, and a hid- 
 eous swelling would come. That is what hap- 
 pened to my father. There was no physician at 
 the mine, sahib, and you know it doesn't pay to 
 keep people who can't work any more; so Meh- 
 met Ali ordered my father turned loose and the 
 rest of our family along with him. Twenty-eight 
 miles we went, walking and crawling, in the di- 
 rection of home, and when we came near Nagpur 
 a native Christian said, 'Go to the Methodist mis- 
 sionary, and he will help you.' " 
 
 Among those sweating slaves at the mine was 
 Dahli the finest, pluckiest brown urchin you
 
 DAHLI THE MANGANESE SLAVE 61 
 
 can fancy and if I had known it I suppose I 
 should have been even crazier to liberate Meh- 
 met's dupes than I was, though I burned with 
 just that desire already, and had the law on my 
 side as I well realized. Long ago, the English 
 took the stand that there must be no slavery, 
 serfdom, or peonage under the British flag any- 
 where on earth. 
 
 But before going to the mine I should have to 
 drum up funds, as I foresaw that Mehmet would 
 never turn his minions loose without compensa- 
 tion. Accordingly I went tearing around among 
 my jolly English friends after promises of money, 
 for in those days all our missions felt poor. But 
 wherever I told about Mehmet Ali and his 
 slaves, Englishmen laughed uproariously, and 
 said I must be crazy with the heat, and denied 
 that any such scandalous abuses could exist in 
 India. 
 
 "I like your spirit," I replied, "but now look 
 here, gentlemen, I'm going anyhow slaves or 
 no slaves and if I find the story is true and 
 spend money getting those folks out, are you 
 prepared to be good sports and foot the bill?" 
 
 They laughed again, and said they most as-
 
 62 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 suredly were, and I took their word for it, and 
 began my preparations for the start. 
 
 They were a trifle elaborate, for I said to my- 
 self, "If I go as a mere civilian, Mehmet Ali 
 won't be much impressed ; I must take along my 
 uniform. Surely, he'll respect that." For, al- 
 though an American, I was a chaplain in the 
 British Army, and I assumed that Mehmet 
 would know that my chaplain's rig denoted the 
 rank of captain. Moreover, I thought best to 
 take a tent, and to camp within sight of Meh- 
 met Ali's house and let it appear that I had come 
 with the intention of staying there until he saw 
 fit to do as I ordered. And, by the way, "put- 
 ting on dog," as the English say, I resolved to 
 take with me a servant. 
 
 So I called Anton, the splendid, stalwart, fear- 
 less young Hindu who had been brought up by 
 one of our missionaries in Southeast India 
 where there are many Portuguese (hence the 
 Portuguese names he bore) and who was now 
 my devoted servant and Man Friday, and, when- 
 ever I went out adventuring in the jungle, my 
 cook. 
 
 "Anton," said I, "how would you like to help
 
 DAHLI THE MANGANESE SLAVE 63 
 
 liberate a thousand slaves? There are armed 
 guards in the way, and the Mohammedan slave 
 driver is by all accounts a pretty hot proposition. 
 Understand me; I'm not asking you to go, but 
 if " 
 
 "Sahib!" he interrupted eagerly, "you know 
 I'll go," and that night we started. 
 
 We always prefer to travel at night in India 
 when a trip has to be made by bullock cart. It 
 is far easier on the bullocks and on us. We 
 escape the terrible daytime heat, and, once we 
 get used to it, we can sleep fairly soundly in 
 our carts. 
 
 I wonder what Dahli thought, next day, when 
 we arrived and pitched our tent in a grove of 
 magnificent palm trees on a knoll overlooking 
 the mine. From somewhere inside the great 
 stockade of bamboo he must have seen us. But 
 I remember only too well what I myself thought. 
 As I looked down from the knoll and watched 
 the thousand busy laborers getting out man- 
 ganese, with guards armed to the teeth pacing to 
 and fro before the gates, I growled, "Now, isn't 
 this a situation? One Yankee one count him 
 trying to upset all that!"
 
 64 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 At another time and in another mood, I might 
 have found the scene very interesting, for man- 
 ganese is one of India's greatest r esources, and 
 the Steel Corporation must have manganese or 
 quit making armor plate for the world's navies, 
 and I remember a queer, close-mouthed young 
 Englishman who had turned up near Ramtek 
 several years before and begun wandering over 
 the hills and breaking stones with a little ham- 
 mer, as he was a geologist and analytical chemist. 
 
 Climbing a barren hill one day, he sat down at 
 the top, broke off a piece of jutting rock, felt its 
 weight, hammered it into tiny bits, gazed at the 
 bits long and earnestly, and, springing up in a 
 fever of wild excitement, fairly flung himself 
 down that hill and vanished without breathing a 
 word to anyone. Next day he was at the gov- 
 ernment office taking out prospecting, mining 
 and land licenses, for he had discovered the solid 
 mountain of manganese that has since made his 
 fortune and not only his but those of his friends. 
 Talk about your Wall Street brokers ! See what 
 India can do. 
 
 But I was not concerned about manganese 
 just now. I was looking over the ground with
 
 I GAINED ON HIM ONLY WITH THE GREATEST DIFFICULTY. 
 
 I TOOK OUT A BOX OF 
 MATCHES AND PUT IT 
 INTO DAHLl'S HAND. 
 
 "PERHAPS YOU WILL HAVE 
 TO SET FIRE TO A HOUSE' ' -
 
 DAHLI THE MANGANESE SLAVE 65 
 
 a view to action. I could see a rather pretentious 
 house, as houses go in India, and took it to be 
 Mehmet's, as it stood close to the principal gate 
 in the stockade; and off to the right I saw a 
 native village council trees, temple, and rows 
 of native huts and heard the yapping of half- 
 starved village dogs. One likes to have a village 
 near at hand. It is a source of supplies and may 
 turn out to be a mighty convenient haven of 
 refuge. 
 
 As soon as we had got things into good work- 
 ing order in our camp, I put on my khaki uni- 
 form and, taking Anton with me for style 
 rather than for utility went and paid my re- 
 spects to Mehmet Ali. 
 
 In his oily, hypocritical way the old Moham- 
 medan was a model of cordiality at first. But, 
 the instant I approached the subject of labor 
 conditions at the mine, all his polished manners 
 deserted him. While he refrained from calling 
 me "a dog of a Christian," his wicked little eyes 
 said that and more, and he snarled contemptu- 
 ously out of his great beard, "Who are you, to 
 come nosing into other people's affairs like this?
 
 66 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 Out with you! Go! I know that uniform it's 
 only a chaplain's." 
 
 But here Anton showed there was utility in 
 him, as well as style. "Khdbardar!" he cried. 
 "You'd better look out!" adding, "It's a chap- 
 lain's uniform, yes, but the man who wears it is 
 a Captain Sahib, in the British army." 
 
 "Ten thousand pardons, sahib!" exclaimed 
 Mehmet. Then, salaaming reverentially, "I am 
 at your service!" 
 
 "In that case," said I, "you will turn loose 
 your slaves." 
 
 "Slaves, sahib? Slaves? There are no slaves 
 here. What do you mean, sahib ?" 
 
 I told him that every man, woman and child 
 at work in that mine must go free. 
 
 "But but," he protested, clutching nervously 
 at his robes, "they are in debt to me up to their 
 ears. They owe three thousand rupees, sahib. 
 Three thousand rupees for railway tickets and 
 food!" 
 
 "Prove it! Get out your books!" said I. 
 
 Though boiling with secret indignation, he 
 hobbled away and got his big ledger, and we 
 looked into it, and, while we found nothing to
 
 DAHLI THE MANGANESE SLAVE 67 
 
 substantiate his story, found nothing that con- 
 tradicted it out and out. "Mehmet Ali," I said 
 at length, "your bookkeeping is enough to make 
 one's head swim. Suppose I go to the govern- 
 ment office and hunt up your income tax report 
 and see what statement you made of sums owing 
 you." 
 
 At that, he wilted. "Come, now!" I de- 
 manded. "Deducting their pay for the time they 
 have been here, how much do these people really 
 owe you?" 
 
 He answered, "Five hundred rupees, sahib" 
 in American money about a hundred and sev- 
 enty-five dollars. 
 
 Whipping out my check book, I wrote a check 
 for the amount, threw it on the ground at Meh- 
 met's feet, and cried, "There you are! Take it! 
 And I've more to say. All these slaves of yours 
 must be turned loose by five o'clock this after- 
 noon, or you'll suffer for it!" 
 
 Having gone my full length of good American 
 bluff, I turned on my heel and left him, and back 
 we went to our camp, where I paced up and down 
 in front of my tent for quite a while thinking 
 hard. Then I stepped inside and loaded my shot-
 
 68 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 gun, and presently I heard Anton call, "Sahib! 
 come quickly!" 
 
 I sprang to the door of the tent and saw An- 
 ton pointing a brown finger toward a gate in 
 the stockade. "Look!" he said. "A small boy 
 has just come out." 
 
 This was my first glimpse of Dahli. "Fine!" 
 I said. "We can makes use of that boy! Let's 
 coax him up here." As the road from the gate 
 led past our camp, this looked easy, and when 
 the boy came near, I called and he gingerly ap- 
 proached. 
 
 "Where are you going, lad?" I asked. 
 
 "To the village on an errand for one of the 
 guards." 
 
 I laid a hand on each of his bony young shoul- 
 ders, and said, "Pay close attention, for what I 
 am going to tell you is very important. I am a 
 chaplain in the British army, and that means that 
 I am a captain." 
 
 "Yes, sahib." 
 
 "And I have paid every rupee you folks owe 
 Mehmet and ordered you all set free by five 
 o'clock this afternoon. But the whole thing may 
 still depend on you, my boy. You look like a
 
 DAHLI THE MANGANESE SLAVE 69 
 
 fine, brave youngster, and I believe you are. 
 Will you risk your life to give those poor slaves 
 freedom?" 
 
 "Yes, sahib. What must I do?" 
 
 I took out a box of matches and put it into 
 Dahli's hand. "Perhaps nothing, but perhaps 
 you will have to set fire to a house. If Mehmet 
 fails to turn you all loose at five o'clock, wait an 
 hour, and then if he hasn't done it, set fire to a 
 house at the far end of the enclosure. All the 
 guards will rush out to the fire. That's your 
 chance to make a break for liberty, the entire 
 thousand of you." 
 
 "Yes, sahib." 
 
 "But there'll be a lot to do between now and 
 six o'clock. You must whisper the news around 
 among the people and make sure they all under- 
 stand. Tell them to come to me and that I will 
 protect them and be their friend forever." 
 
 "Yes, sahib" and away he trotted on his er- 
 rand. Pretty soon we saw him returning from 
 the village, and he waved his hand at me as he 
 passed near our camp and I felt sure that Dahli 
 would make good. 
 
 I believe I took down my shotgun and ex-
 
 70 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 amined it at least forty-seven times that after- 
 noon as I waited, waited, for five o'clock to 
 come. It seemed as if five o'clock never would 
 come. And all the while we could see the swarms 
 of Hindu men, women, and children toiling 
 wretchedly at the mine, but, as all brown young- 
 sters look alike that far off, we could not dis- 
 tinguish Dahli. How was he acquitting himself? 
 we wondered. Had he spread the news? If he 
 had, were the people ready to trust me ? If they 
 were, and had the grit to defy Ali if he failed to 
 release them at the appointed hour, would their 
 dash for liberty succeed? But the great point, 
 after all, was the question of Dahli's courage. 
 Suppose that, at the last moment, Dahli should 
 lose heart and be afraid to set fire to the house. 
 
 One two three four five! tolled the vil- 
 lage bell. 
 
 We strained our eyes watching and our ears 
 listening for some evidence that Mehmet Ali 
 intended to obey me. There was no such evi- 
 dence. Not a change anywhere. No stopping 
 of work. No orders given to stop. No unusual 
 movement or lack of movement. At the gates,
 
 DAHLI THE MANGANESE SLAVE 71 
 
 armed guards pacing steadily to and fro just 
 as before. 
 
 During the next hour I raged up and down in 
 front of my tent, fuming and storming and 
 sorely tempted to take my loaded shotgun and 
 go straight to Mehmet and well, nudge him. 
 
 At last oh, at last! the village bell rang 
 out. We counted strokes. One! Two! Three! 
 Four ! Five ! Six! And now hurrah for Dahli ! 
 we heard a boy's shrill voice cry, "Aggl Aggl 
 'Agg!""Fire\ Fire! Fire!" and a curl of 
 whitish smoke oozed out from the door of a house 
 at the far end of the enclosure, and up its grass 
 roof streaked flames, and instantly the whole 
 place was in commotion as the guards rushed 
 headlong to put out the fire. 
 
 Then I saw what Moses saw an exodus ! Out 
 through the gates poured a thousand woebe- 
 gone people. In a cloud of yellow dust they 
 came, with children and goats and dogs and bed- 
 ding and all they possessed. They swarmed 
 around me rejoicing. Loaded shotgun in hand, 
 I waited for the old Mohammedan and his gang 
 to come out, but, even after they had extin-
 
 72 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 guished the blaze, they failed to show up, and 
 a few days later my check was cashed. 
 
 In my bullock cart that night I headed a weird 
 procession as we started away the whole mob of 
 us for Nagpur city. And of course you know 
 what I was planning. Thanks to Dahli, I had 
 been able to free these poor wretches from Meh- 
 met Ali. It remained to free them from heathen- 
 ism and make them over into good Christians. 
 This was not difficult, and among our converts 
 was the boy who had set fire to the house. Be- 
 cause of the way he had stood by me when I 
 played the part of Moses, I renamed him Aaron. 
 
 But what has all this to do with Buffalo Bill? 
 Everything. Wild and free and savage he was 
 then. Wild and free and savage he would 
 have continued, no doubt, had not Dahli made me 
 responsible for a thousand rescued slaves. I 
 had to provide for them somehow, and the place 
 I chose for their abode was a tract of land near 
 the jungle where Bill consorted with the stupid, 
 slatish-blue buffaloes. 
 
 It had once been the site of a village, and ten 
 thousand high-caste Hindus had lived there, but 
 the cholera came and every living creature per-
 
 DAHLI THE MANGANESE SLAVE 73 
 
 ished, even the dogs and cats, and then began the 
 inevitable process going back to jungle. De- 
 cay set in. Big trees grew up through walls 
 and crumbling temples. The village was in 
 ruins houses wrecked, walls caved in, and the 
 whole place a tangle of wild undergrowth. Then 
 along came the land department people, who cut 
 down the trees for lumber and made ready to 
 sell off the land. We bought enough of it for 
 our thousand liberated slaves and settled them 
 there on farms, and they agreed to give us a 
 quarter of their produce annually for four years, 
 after which the land would be theirs. 
 
 I was down there one fall, gathering in the 
 mission's share of the produce cotton and 
 wheat by the carload and a herd of goats and 
 calves, and great quantities of clarified butter 
 (ghee, they call it) and we were about ready 
 to start home when I chanced to look across the 
 fields, and, away off toward the jungle, saw a 
 herd of tame buffaloes. Sitting on the back of 
 one of the huge, smooth, gray-blue beasts, and 
 swinging a club, was a naked Hindu boy about 
 ten years old. 
 
 I said to the natives around me, "Dekho Kon-
 
 74 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 ache por tathe ahe?" "Whose boy is that over 
 there?" 
 
 In a remarkably unconcerned sort of way they 
 answered, "Nobody knows." 
 
 "But hasn't he any folks?" 
 
 "All dead, sir. He belongs to nobody, and 
 lives out there with the buffaloes." 
 
 I said, "I want that boy. He must go to 
 school." 
 
 They grinned and nudged one another in the 
 ribs as they replied, "Sahib, you will have to 
 catch him first." 
 
 This reminded me of a recipe in my old Scotch 
 grandmother's cookbook "To make hare pot- 
 pie : First get a hare" but I made up my mind 
 right then that that lad's career as a wild boy in 
 the jungle was to come to an end mighty soon. 
 How my heart went out to him! I had a boy of 
 my own safe at home, and realized what it would 
 mean if he were living with only beasts for com- 
 rades. 
 
 I had been a star sprinter in college, and here 
 was a chance to see how much speed I had in me. 
 I gave my khaki hunting coat to my cook to 
 hold, kicked off my hunting boots, threw down
 
 DAHLI THE MANGANESE SLAVE 75 
 
 my pith helmet, and started for the boy. He 
 soon caught sight of something yellow and lively 
 bounding toward him, and, after a long, keen, 
 searching look, slid down from the buffalo's back, 
 looked again to make sure that I was headed his 
 way, saw that I was, and cut for the woods, 
 striking the ground every eight feet and glanc- 
 ing over his shoulder much too often, as he lost 
 speed by it. 
 
 But he led me a corking chase despite that. 
 He was all bones and no clothes ; I was all bones, 
 but I gained on him only with the greatest diffi- 
 culty. When he saw I was gaining, he gave a 
 wild yell and turned sharply to the left and ran 
 toward a river. This brought a harvested field 
 of Kaffir corn between us, and the stubble made 
 bad going for me but I cut across it, sprint- 
 ing as I had not sprinted in years. There was 
 now only a slight distance to gain. It shortened. 
 It shortened still more. He doubled back. I 
 leaped headlong, and tackled him squarely. 
 
 I have tried to catch a greased pig at a county 
 fair and I have played football some, but that 
 boy was the slipperiest proposition I ever had 
 hold of. He kicked, squirmed, scratched and
 
 76 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 bit, but I tucked his arms behind him, jiu-jitsu 
 fashion, and I marched him toward the cheering 
 crowd, while he kicked back at me every few 
 steps. 
 
 We put some clothes on him the first he had 
 worn since nobody knows when and, because 
 of the circumstances of his capture, I named 
 him Buffalo Bill. I thought the next thing to 
 do was to give him a job; so I set him astride a 
 buffalo cow and told him to ride behind and drive 
 the herd back to the mission station. All the 
 way he boo-hooed, and tried to get the sympathy 
 of passers-by, but when they asked what we 
 were doing with the boy, I said to them, "Don't 
 butt in!" 
 
 We reached home in a few days, and, after a 
 scrub and a shearing, Buffalo Bill was put into 
 school. He moped around for a while and made 
 no friends until he began to get his bearings, and 
 then he suddenly cheered up and copied the other 
 boys with astonishing success, and got to be a 
 regular favorite popular, actually. He studied 
 hard to make up for lost time, and took a huge 
 interest in athletics. 
 
 Except as we missionaries introduce them, na-
 
 DAHLI THE MANGANESE SLAVE 77 
 
 tive India has no sports. There are only two 
 sorts of native men the toilers and the thinkers. 
 If they toil, they can't be thinkers. If they are 
 thinkers they must have delicate hands and small 
 muscles, with no sign of labor about them any- 
 where. I had to inculcate other ideals. I taught 
 our boys to "eat air," as they called taking ex- 
 ercise, and become fine, big-chested, hard-mus- 
 cled runners and jumpers. Buffalo Bill won 
 three prizes for scholarship, but he grew strong 
 and athletic and let his inky black hair get long 
 like a football player's, and there was fire in his 
 dark eyes, and he feared nothing on earth. One 
 day the chief commissioner gave Bill a medal for 
 running, and it was my duty to pin it on the 
 boy's shirt. As I did so, I said to the commis- 
 sioner, "I have a good mind to keep this, for I 
 can beat him running." 
 
 You can guess what became of Buffalo Bill. 
 When a boy has been saved from wild barbarism 
 and brought up in a splendid school, and, arriv- 
 ing at young manhood, sees a world of degraded 
 heathen folks eking out a miserable existence all 
 around him in poverty and utter ignorance and 
 benightedness, he wants to turn in and help them.
 
 78 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 Buffalo Bill came to me one night and said, 
 "Upidasli pahije" "I've decided to preach." 
 
 That suited me right down to the ground, but 
 there was one obstacle his name. Who ever 
 heard of a Reverend Buffalo Bill? So I changed 
 it to William. But he keeps his football hair.
 
 IV: Boys of the India Jungle
 
 IV 
 
 Boys of the India Jungle 
 
 COBRAS the big, black, hooded cobras of 
 India are the deadliest snakes known, 
 and for eight years I lived in Nagpur, the city 
 of cobras, where Hindus worship them as gods. 
 All the principal roads leading into Nagpur have 
 wayside shrines enclosing sham cobras twisted 
 about sham torches and splattered with red paint 
 and decked out with flowers, and upon every 
 snaky idol the natives throw rice and sweetmeats 
 and clarified butter. However, it is not only in 
 Nagpur that cobra worship thrives. You see 
 plenty of it elsewhere for instance, at Woom- 
 rauti. 
 
 One day I visited a family of weavers at 
 Woomrauti and found them weaving a long strip 
 of cloth in an alleyway, and a small boy was put- 
 ting the red dye on the threads with a brush. I 
 wanted that boy for our mission school, but his 
 
 81
 
 82 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 father said, "There'd be no profit in that for me. 
 He puts color on the cloths." Still, I had some 
 hope of persuading the man and so, in order to 
 gain his confidence and good will, I went into 
 the house with him and we squatted crosslegged 
 on the smooth dirt floor. 
 
 While telling him about our school and the 
 great things it could do for native boys, I chanced 
 to notice close to me a hole where a bamboo 
 driven into the ground had rotted away. It 
 piqued my curiosity, so I asked, a trifle ner- 
 vously, "Yih chuna ache gihr?" "Is that a rat 
 hole?" 
 
 ff Ne, sahib, wuh sampache garh" replied the 
 native "No, sir, it's a snake hole." He said 
 this as calmly as you might mention a tank for 
 goldfish. His impassive brown face betrayed 
 no anxiety. His dark eyes never changed their 
 expression. Yet there, right in his very house, 
 dwelt the "hooded death." 
 
 I wiggled away from the hole, and we went 
 on talking, but I watched that hole intently and 
 after a little while I saw a cobra's mouse-like 
 head stealthily emerge from it and then pop 
 back in.
 
 BOYS OF THE INDIA JUNGLE 83 
 
 I whipped out my revolver, but the native 
 lifted both hands in vehement protest, and his 
 dark eyes flamed, as he cried excitedly, "Kubhe 
 ne, sahib!" "Never do that, sir!" 
 
 I pulled myself together, tucked away the pis- 
 tol, and said in the calmest tone I could manage, 
 "How long has the snake been here?" 
 
 "A long time, sir." 
 
 "Why on earth don't you kill it?" 
 
 For answer he solemnly went and got a little 
 red earthen dish, poured some goat's milk into it 
 from a coconut shell, set it on the floor, and 
 pushed it over toward the snake hole with a stick. 
 Immediately the head and dreadful hood came 
 up through the hole, and a bar of light from the 
 open door fell glistening on the cobra's scales. I 
 watched, fascinated. Five feet: long and big 
 around as my wrist, the deadly serpent emerged, 
 and began to suck up the milk. The man shut 
 his eyes and began to pray to the snake, and when 
 it had gone back into its hole, I said, "Doesn't 
 it sometimes do mischief?" 
 
 In a shuddering sort of way, but not with any 
 trace of deep resentment, the man replied, "Sir, 
 my little niece lay asleep on this very floor one
 
 84 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 night, and next morning we found her cold and 
 dead, with the marks of snake fangs in her 
 wrist." 
 
 "Let me kill it!" I begged. 
 
 He would listen to no such thing. "Don't, 
 sahib!" he cried. "Perhaps it is my dead father, 
 who has been born again as a cobra because he 
 sinned when he was a man," said my host; "and 
 perhaps it was because of my niece's sins that the 
 cobra was ordered to bite her. Who am I, sir, to 
 fight against the gods?" 
 
 All my efforts to talk him out of his belief 
 failed utterly, and I failed to get the boy, which 
 cut me to the quick. Missionaries in India be- 
 come used to seeing grown-ups play fast and 
 loose with the "hooded death," and come to look 
 upon cobra worship as little worse than other 
 forms of heathenism smallpox worship, for 
 example but when we see boys' lives endan- 
 gered by it we are furious. I had an orphanage 
 full of splendid, brown-skinned youngsters all 
 pep and jollity and brightness, and how I did 
 want that boy I failed to get! Think what we 
 might have made of him. Several of our finest 
 native Christians came up out of surroundings
 
 BOYS OF THE INDIA JUNGLE 85 
 
 even more shocking than his. You remember 
 Gani, the wild boy, and "Buffalo Bill," another 
 wild boy, and there have been many more, 
 among them a lad we named Titus. 
 
 Up in the Gond Hills, one night, we had a 
 big fire roaring and crackling to keep off wild 
 beasts and make the jungle seem a little home- 
 like, and the men were lying around in more 
 ways than one when suddenly two horrified na- 
 tives rushed up, dragging a fifteen-year-old boy 
 who had been hurt. 
 
 ff Dawai pcdje!" "We want medicine!" they 
 cried breathlessly. They told us a tiger had at- 
 tacked a cow, and the boy had gone after him 
 single-handed, armed only with a kind of toma- 
 hawk, and hacked him so viciously that the tiger 
 flew to a low tree and scrambled up into a fork 
 about four feet from the ground. Even then the 
 boy chopped at his legs and shouted for help 
 until the villagers came and dispatched the beast 
 with their axes. In the fight the tiger had 
 reached out and mauled the boy's arm from shoul- 
 der to elbow. It was all in tatters and bleeding 
 profusely. 
 
 I knew that if the tiger had been eating carrion
 
 86 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 recently, its claws must have been filthy, and 
 blood poisoning might set in; so I washed out 
 the gashes with antiseptics and bandaged the 
 arm. The boy never winced under the treat- 
 ment, even when I knew it was torture to him, 
 and he told of hair-raising encounters he had had 
 with snakes and wild beasts, relating his experi- 
 ences as coolly as if such things were an every- 
 day affair the world over. 
 
 "Here's a boy worth saving," I said to myself. 
 I explained about our schools and how we make 
 teachers and smart men out of jungle lads, and 
 asked him to go away with me and get to be 
 somebody, and he consented. We saved his arm, 
 and, although once or twice he ran away, we 
 made a splendid man of Titus. 
 
 And now about Gholi. I had been spending 
 a few days at Godarwadi in the Central Prov- 
 inces and, before leaving, went to talk things 
 over for the last time with Dahli Das, a native 
 worker there. He said to me, "Come! There 
 is something I want to show you." 
 
 "All right," said I. "Lead the way." 
 
 He took me through the town and on toward 
 a river bank; there we came to what had once
 
 BOYS OF THE INDIA JUNGLE 87 
 
 been a beautiful garden. We entered a broken- 
 down gate, passed through an avenue of palms, 
 and before us in the center of the garden found 
 a square well with the water twenty feet below 
 the ground and reached by steps of red sand- 
 stone. Above the well, stone elephants' heads 
 reached out from four directions, the tips of their 
 trunks touching. Next the water a dozen carved 
 heads trimmed a coping. The walls and steps 
 were moss covered, showing that they had not 
 been in use for many a day. Grass sprouted 
 from the crevices. Two of the elephants' trunks 
 had broken off. All was now ruin and decay 
 and a dank, green scum covered the pool. 
 
 I could not help wishing myself back in the 
 days when lotus blossoms floated on that pool 
 and when up and down those carven steps went 
 dainty Hindu girls to bring water to a noble 
 dwelling in the garden a dwelling of which not 
 one vestige now remained. I imagined the time 
 when richly attired Hindu women sat among 
 flowers and birds beneath the moon, with a tame 
 leopard to guard them, or perhaps a tiger held 
 in leash by a tall, swarthy slave, while with na- 
 tive music they beguiled the lovely Eastern night.
 
 88 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 At the foot of the garden, toward the river 
 and outlined against the sky, I saw a group of 
 old temples, their cracked and broken with neg- 
 lect and decay and by storms of scores of years. 
 As we approached them, I wondered what it was 
 that Dahli Das had been so anxious to show me, 
 but I was not long kept waiting, for, in answer 
 to his musical cry of ff Koi hai?" "Is anyone 
 there?" the seemingly deserted temples ap- 
 peared to awaken, and out from them poured the 
 saddest throng of people I had ever looked upon 
 and the most terrifying. They were lepers ! 
 
 Yes, the garden that had once been so beauti- 
 ful was now an abode of the living dead. No 
 more flowers. No more birds. No more loveli- 
 ness. Instead, only rags, poverty, contagious 
 disease, and misery. And among them I saw 
 several children playing untainted as yet. 
 
 Dahli Das gathered the lepers together at the 
 foot of the temple steps, and, even though we 
 were careful not to get very near them, I shud- 
 dered, not alone from fear of contracting the 
 disease, but from pity when I saw them raise 
 now a fingerless hand, now a stump of an arm, 
 as they talked in husky leper voices.
 
 BOYS OF THE INDIA JUNGLE 89 
 
 Yet amid it all there was something beautiful 
 and bright, for they were Christians, and while 
 their poor bodies were passing away they looked 
 forward to the life beyond death. 
 
 I secured one of the little lads a fine, plump, 
 curly-haired youngster they called Gholi, which 
 means "little ball." But we had a heartbreaking 
 scene before they let me take him away. Both 
 his parents had been lepers ; both were now dead ; 
 and yet, although I explained that no one is 
 born a leper and that the boy was still free from 
 taint, but that if he remained there he was al- 
 most sure to become diseased like the others, they 
 wept and wailed. 
 
 We named him Paulus, and he has grown up 
 to be a splendid man, and has married a high- 
 caste girl. They have two of the sweetest little 
 children I ever saw. 
 
 In India, where calamities abound, the worst, 
 perhaps, is famine, and it was during a great 
 famine that we found a boy we re-christened 
 Luke. Village after village was being com- 
 pletely wiped out, and one day in villages far 
 apart two pitiful little bundles of bones were 
 laid at the roadside in hope that our mission cart
 
 90 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 would come rumbling along and save them a 
 baby boy and a baby girl. The mission cart ar- 
 rived in time, and took the waifs to the mission 
 station, where they grew and became strong. We 
 found a lady whose baby boy had died a little 
 fellow named Benjamin and she paid for the 
 upbringing and education of the tiny Hindu lad 
 and gave him her dead child's name ; but, as there 
 were other Benjamins in our missions and she 
 wanted no mistake made, she added Luke; so 
 Benjamin Luke he became and we knew him gen- 
 erally as Luke. We called the girl Miriam. 
 Several years ago, when they had reached man- 
 hood and womanhood, Luke and Miriam were 
 married in the mission church with wedding veil, 
 orange blossoms and all. There are now seven 
 chapters to Luke. 
 
 Did I say that famine was the worst of calami- 
 ties in India? I take that back. The worst ca- 
 lamity is Hinduism, and not so much because 
 of what Hinduism is as because of the atrocious 
 things it compels the natives to do. For exam- 
 ple, it can bring to pass a scene like the one that 
 threw Shadrach into our hands. An awful 
 scene! Monstrous!
 
 BOYS OF THE INDIA JUNGLE 91 
 
 On an ash heap outside a native village four 
 dogs were waiting to eat a tiny Hindu boy, and 
 no one cared. He was ill. His mother had 
 wearied of his crying all the time, and had taken 
 him to the priest, who said, "Put him out to die; 
 the devil is in his stomach." So there he was. 
 And there were the dogs waiting. 
 
 I didn't know it. With a string of lumber- 
 ing bullock carts, I was a long way off in the 
 jungle with no intention whatever of pulling up 
 for the night at that particular village. But 
 some vague unreasoning impulse got hold of me, 
 and, without any discernible object in it, I cried 
 out to my driver, "Lowkar jao!" "Hurry up!" 
 
 He twisted the bullock's tail (that is the way 
 we crank up our "jungle auto." since anyone 
 dealing with a self-starter may find himself deal- 
 ing with a self -starter that is likely to hook) and 
 we crashed through the forest at the rate of five 
 miles an hour. By sundown we had reached our 
 camping place beneath a magnificent tree fully 
 a hundred feet across. There was a well near-by, 
 and a row of native huts, and an ash heap. On 
 the ash heap sat four mangy, hungry-looking, 
 big, yellow dogs, eyeing something within the cir-
 
 92 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 cle they made. Supposing it was a cat they were 
 tormenting, I walked over to the ash pile and 
 kicked at them till they skulked off, with white 
 fangs showing. To my horror I saw that the 
 center of their interest was a tiny naked boy al- 
 most dead, his poor, skinny body as gray as the 
 ashes he sat on. He was so sick and starved that 
 he could barely keep upright. His eyes were 
 shut. He had a great sore on his forehead, and 
 his body was hideously puffed out by a swollen 
 spleen, while his arms were about as big around 
 as the handle of a child's broom, and his fingers 
 the size of slate pencils. Vermin swarmed all 
 over him. 
 
 I hurriedly gave him a stimulant, and ordered 
 our native cook to prepare some broth, while I 
 clipped the boy's filthy hair, and, after massag- 
 ing his body with oil, laid him on the straw in the 
 bottom of my cart. Nothing but his pulse 
 only too feeble at that showed he was still 
 alive. 
 
 After two days' care he opened a pair of big, 
 hollow eyes and gazed at us in terror. I had not 
 beheld such eyes since I fell out of Grand- 
 father's hayloft and saw an owl on a rafter
 
 BOYS OF THE INDIA JUNGLE 93 
 
 solemnly taking me in. As for the child's ter- 
 ror, I understood it perfectly. The last sight 
 those eyes had rested on had been the group of 
 hungry curs waiting for him to die. 
 
 I smiled at him. I don't believe he remem- 
 bered anyone's ever smiling at him before. He 
 smiled back and won our hearts completely. I 
 took him to our school, and named him Shad- 
 rach because I found him on the ashes. When 
 he got to be a man he became a power among the 
 natives, traveling from village to village and 
 teaching them to cast off Hinduism. 
 
 And now comes the story that delights me 
 most of all. Far back in the jungle I came one 
 day to an old, deserted house about forty feet 
 square, with its one door off and its grass roof 
 caved in, and heard boyish voices shouting in 
 chorus, "Maro! Maro! MaroF "Beat him! 
 Beat him! Beat him!" 
 
 I sprang from my cart, and ran and looked 
 in through the open doorway. I saw twenty- 
 two small boys, not one of them more than ten 
 years old, standing in a ring, while on the floor 
 were two boys, one sitting on the other and beat-
 
 94 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 ing him in the face. "Tamba!" I cried "Stop 
 that!" 
 
 They jumped into the air about a yard, well 
 scared, and looked around for a way of escape, 
 but I blocked the only door, so they looked at 
 one another in mighty comical dismay. 
 
 I smiled, and it was a friendly, pitying kind 
 of smile, for they were as forlorn a gang of 
 youngsters as I ever beheld hungry, dirty, and 
 frightened and presently a boy back in the 
 crowd said to the other, "Don't be afraid! The 
 sahib has a twinkle in his eye." 
 
 Then I said, "Boys, how would you like to 
 have a full stomach three times a day and a nice 
 place to sleep?" 
 
 They stared at one another, puzzled and very 
 much astonished, and I went on. "If you'll 
 come with me I'll give you a place to sleep and 
 shoes for your feet and clothes to keep you warm 
 and dry in the rain and three square meals every 
 day." 
 
 If Saccha bat hai?" said one of them "Is it 
 true?" 
 
 I replied, "Ishwar saccha hoi" "Before God, 
 it is true."
 
 BOYS OF THE INDIA JUNGLE 95 
 
 For a few moments they held a grand pow- 
 wow among themselves, and at last a boy said 
 to the crowd, "I am ready to go with him." And 
 I walked away toward my cart with two dozen 
 wretched orphans tagging after me, for they had 
 come from villages where smallpox and the 
 plague had wrought terrible havoc among the 
 natives and the boys had run for their lives and 
 had lived together in the ruined temple with only 
 such food as they could find. 
 
 All told, I have picked up something like two 
 hundred Hindu boys, and, while I can't say I 
 ever went at it from policy, it has been the best 
 policy conceivable, for, out of the two hundred, 
 quite a number have become native missionaries, 
 and a native missionary has an influence no for- 
 eigner can hope to gain. In villages where the 
 people would resent interference by a white man, 
 they gather in great crowds to hear Gani sing, 
 or to listen while "Buffalo Bill," the athlete who 
 was once a wild boy, tells them how they may es- 
 cape from the abominable oppression of Hindu- 
 ism, or while Shadrach, the eloquent, tears Hin- 
 duism to ribbons. And nothing can equal the 
 superb devotion of these lads. As a native mis-
 
 96 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 sionary Benjamin Luke gets a house to live in 
 and it has a garden full of fruit trees, but his 
 salary is a joke. Not long ago an Englishman 
 came along and said, "Luke, what is your sal- 
 ary?" 
 
 "Forty-five rupees a month." 
 
 "If you will leave this work and take a gov- 
 ernment job, we will give you a hundred and 
 eighty. Think it over, and let me know your 
 decision." 
 
 "You can have my answer now, sahib" The 
 Englishman was delighted, as it seemed to him 
 that there could be only one answer, but Luke 
 continued, "Ever since the day when my little 
 wife and I were laid out on the road to starve, 
 the mission people have been our greatest 
 friends. They have fed us, clothed us, educated 
 us and loved us, and I wouldn't leave them now 
 for ten thousand rupees a month." 
 
 In the light of all this, you can see how it cuts 
 when I remember the boy I failed to get the 
 weaver boy at Woomrauti, in whose house 
 lurked the "hooded death," and who, if still 
 alive, is doubtless saying his prayers to a snake. 
 Ankus was the boy's name. It means an ele-
 
 BOYS OF THE INDIA JUNGLE 97 
 
 phant goad. What a goad to drive ahead our 
 work he might have made, and indeed may yet 
 make ! For we have not done with Ankus by a 
 long shot. Thanks largely to the devotion of 
 Hindu boys we have rescued, we are undermin- 
 ing the caste system and putting democracy in 
 its place and we are substituting for snake wor- 
 ship an enlightened faith. In a word, we are 
 making a new India, where Ankus will meet on 
 every hand the ideas and principles and applied 
 decencies of the good old U. S. A.
 
 V: Trapped Among Crocodiles
 
 Trapped Among" Crocodiles 
 
 HUGE, bloodthirsty crocodiles, anywhere 
 from ten to a dozen feet long, swarm in 
 the rivers of South India, and even a river bank 
 is dangerous, for the monsters dig a hole under 
 it and crawl out to bask in the blistering sun- 
 shine, or swim close to the shore until some guile- 
 less deer or goat or perhaps a man approaches 
 the stream. Then, striking a terrible, swift 
 blow with its tail, a crocodile knocks the victim 
 splash! into the muddy water, and darts 
 away with him to its lair. 
 
 To make matters worse, there are no bridges 
 none whatever and when people ask if we 
 have automobiles in India, I tell them, "Yes 
 fords in all our rivers." The happy-go-lucky 
 road master, out there, sees no need for bridges, 
 as the seasons are so arranged that except during 
 
 the Christmas "mango showers" there is abso- 
 101
 
 102 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 lutely no rainfall. When the rains are on, and 
 brimming rivers alive with man-eating reptiles 
 oh, well, let sensible folks stay at home. 
 
 It is a satisfactory enough rule for Hindus, 
 perhaps, but not for a missionary like myself; 
 rain or shine, drought or flood, we fellows are 
 always on the jump. 
 
 Not long ago I was touring the Bastar State 
 with a squad of native Christians in three little 
 two-wheeled bullock carts, and along towards 
 dusk one evening we came to the Pranhita River, 
 a tributary of the sacred Godavari. As usual, 
 there was no bridge, and yet there seemed to be 
 a fair chance of inducing the "muchis," or fish- 
 ermen, to fetch their boats. Boats, did I say? 
 I must beg a decent, self-respecting boat's par- 
 don for the slander. They are nothing more or 
 less than rude logs hollowed out like a horse 
 trough and fastened together in pairs with bam- 
 boos and cocoanut rope in such a way as to leave 
 a space of about five feet between. A clumsy 
 deck at bow and stern provides standing room 
 for the boatmen, who pole the craft along. A 
 cart has to be painfully lifted aboard and placed 
 with a wheel in the hollow of each log; then you
 
 TRAPPED AMONG CROCODILES 103 
 
 back the cart to the middle of your jungle ferry- 
 boat, fix your last thought upon your family, say 
 your prayers, and start off. The bullocks swim 
 behind. 
 
 We hallooed at the top of our lungs for 
 mucliis and kept it up for several minutes, but no 
 muchis appeared. Gingerly approaching the 
 bank, we gazed anxiously upstream and down. 
 Not a boat was to be seen. It looked like a clear 
 case of ford it or quit, and nobody wanted to 
 quit, though I may say that a nastier, more, unin- 
 viting ford had seldom confronted me. Float- 
 ing logs, any one of which might overturn a 
 cart, went racing by. Swirling, reddish brown 
 eddies the Pranhita seemed fully one-eighth 
 mud showed where drifted rocks lay strewn 
 along the bottom. 
 
 As we stood there, hesitating or rather, con- 
 sidering one of my men pointed significantly 
 at certain marks in the mire at his feet. "Croco- 
 dile tracks, sahib," said he, and, sure enough, 
 there were tracks in profusion footprints of 
 savage reptiles that had but lately slunk away 
 into the water. We saw tail marks, too, and hol- 
 lows where the big beasts had lain all day in the
 
 104 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 sun ; and there was evidence that a ferocious pair 
 had been battling deep holes, with mire and 
 blood mixed, told the story. 
 
 I was strongly tempted to pitch our tents 
 right where we were and postpone the crossing 
 till daybreak, for already the light had begun to 
 fail. But time was precious, and I realized that 
 it would be slow work rigging our carts for the 
 trip across and slow work crossing ; better have it 
 over with at once, and camp on the other side, as 
 we could then count on resuming our journey 
 before sunrise. Nobody likes to ford an angry 
 stream in the dusk, especially where crocodiles 
 abound, yet business is business, so I put the mat- 
 ter up to my men. "We are not afraid, sahib," 
 said they. "Let's risk it the sooner, the bet- 
 ter," and just then a turbaned native came trot- 
 ting to the river bank. I thought, "Excellent! 
 He'll know about muchis" and alas, he did; 
 the bubonic plague was raging in the neighbor- 
 hood, it seemed, and the muchis had run for their 
 lives. 
 
 Naturally, this increased our desire to hurry 
 onward, but the stranger had a bad opinion of 
 the ford and unbosomed himself about it in a
 
 TRAPPED AMONG CROCODILES 105 
 
 style I found distinctly unpleasant. "Only a 
 week ago," said he, "three natives were fording 
 the Pranhita at this very place, when one of 
 them a woman, sahib suddenly gave a shrill, 
 piercing cry and threw up her arms and disap- 
 peared. Not a trace of her has been seen, for 
 you know the ways of the crocodile, it eats every- 
 thing clothes, bangles, earrings, toe rings, and 
 all." 
 
 In pure fun I said to the man, "I'll give you 
 a rupee" (thirty-three cents, or about three days' 
 pay for ordinary labor) "if you will walk across 
 that ford, watch for holes and rocks, and see if 
 we can get over with our carts." 
 
 I never expected him to take me up, though 
 the natives are a great deal less afraid of croco- 
 diles than they ought to be, and sometimes run 
 awful risks hunting them. The usual way is 
 to get a huge chunk of meat and thrust into it 
 a piece of bamboo sharpened at both ends, and 
 tie a rope to the meat, and on the other end of 
 the rope tie a log, and then throw the bait into 
 the river near the crocodile's lair. The beast 
 swims out, presently, sniffs the meat, and gulps 
 it down whole. Of course, the sharp stick lodges
 
 106 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 in his stomach and the creature is fast, and the 
 floating log shows where he is. After a short 
 while, the stick tears his insides, causing hemor- 
 rhage, and the water turns crimson, and in a few 
 hours he is dead and the natives haul in the rope 
 and get him ashore. But a favorite sport in the 
 neighborhood of Cawnpore, Allahabad, and 
 other northern cities, especially those on the 
 Ganges, is shooting crocodiles from boats. For 
 British Civil Service people, this is big fun ; for 
 the natives, however, it is often fatal, as their 
 part in the merry game is to dive after a dead 
 crocodile when he sinks to the bottom, and there 
 are live crocodiles lurking about down there, and 
 many a poor native has been seized and never 
 come up. 
 
 It has always puzzled me to know why natives 
 will consent to hunt these reptiles, for the croco- 
 dile is sacred. Women used to throw their chil- 
 dren into the Ganges as offerings to crocodiles, 
 and, although the British have mostly put a stop 
 to it, the thing is occasionally done even now 
 when some half-crazy fakir has worked up the 
 people to a frenzy of hysteria. While I was in 
 India, a native woman was seen going toward the
 
 TRAPPED AMONG CROCODILES 107 
 
 Ganges ; she had an emaciated babe in her arms 
 weak, puny, and sore-eyed while in front of 
 her ran a plump little boy of five. When she 
 returned, she still had the sickly babe, and her 
 face shone with a fanatical light. As she neared 
 her village, a missionary met her, and, noticing 
 that she had only one child now, whereas she had 
 started out with two, asked what had become of 
 the little boy. The woman hesitated, then said, 
 slowly, "I gave him to Mother Ganga." As- 
 tonished at her words, the missionary exclaimed, 
 "But why did you throw the fine, strong child 
 to the crocodiles and keep the weak one!" She 
 replied, "I don't know what you Americans do, 
 but we Hindus always give the best to the god." 
 Now, as I say, I was only joking when I of- 
 fered the turbaned native a rupee to wade across 
 the Pranhita and see if our carts would be safe in 
 fording. Much to my surprise, he said, eagerly, 
 "Sahib, I'll chance it." Still in fun, I called his 
 bluff. Pressing the rupee into his hand, I told 
 him I wished him luck, and, before I could stop 
 the fellow, he hitched up his dhoti to his waist, 
 and, with a rascally grin I failed to understand 
 at the time, plunged in.
 
 108 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 It is a wonder that he got across at all. The 
 turbulent water reached his waist and now and 
 then almost his shoulders. Floating logs barely 
 missed him. But he made a fine dash of it, from 
 a sporting point of view, though from our own 
 it was an out-and-out swindle, for he took such 
 long, high steps that any number of deep holes 
 and dangerous stones might have been there with- 
 out his finding them for us, and any number of 
 hungry crocodiles, too. Reaching the opposite 
 bank, he ran nimbly ashore, whisked round, and, 
 salaaming profoundly, called out. "Thank you 
 sahib, for the rupee! I live on this side of the 
 river and was going to wade across anyhow." 
 
 Still, my rupee had not been squandered fruit- 
 lessly altogether; at least we now knew more or 
 less definitely how deep the Pranhita was at that 
 ford, and could rig our carts accordingly. As 
 near as I could determine, everything put aboard 
 a cart must be slung two feet or more above the 
 floor on horizontal rods of bamboo quite a job 
 when you come to think of it. Up went rifle, 
 tents, supplies in short, our entire parapher- 
 nalia while the bullocks rested in as pretty a 
 nook of riverside jungle as you will ever behold.
 
 TRAPPED AMONG CROCODILES 109 
 
 I remember the superb mango tree, like mounds 
 of living green ; and tapering bamboos, creaking 
 and swaying aloft; and jungle lime trees, their 
 branches decked with orchids painted red and 
 blue and pink; and tree trunks laden with 
 ferns and tropical moss and lichens. But I 
 hardly think the bullocks had an eye for the 
 beauty of the scene. They were much too 
 cruelly pestered by the flies that buzzed around 
 them in clouds. Nor was I especially excited 
 about the charms of lovely nature, myself. I 
 kept thinking crocodile recalling the story of 
 the woman devoured alive out yonder, recalling 
 the sight of tell-tale marks in the mud at the 
 river's brim, and trying, as best I could, to guess 
 where the crocodile lair was. Not far down 
 stream, I concluded, else why should the beasts 
 have congregated in such numbers at this par- 
 ticular point? 
 
 When at last all was ready, the first cart, with 
 our least precious possessions aboard, went lurch- 
 ing and splashing in as pilot. High up in the 
 top of my own cart, I stood on two pieces of bam- 
 boo and clung to the woven-bamboo roof for
 
 110 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 dear life. Then came the third cart, with my 
 tent, boxes, food, and cook. 
 
 The men behaved magnificently, and I sup- 
 pose that I behaved fairly well, myself that is, 
 in so far as outward conduct went but oh, the 
 tumult of affrighted misgivings within me! 
 Ashore, I relish a fight with a beast tiger, black 
 leopard, panther, black bear, any sort of wild 
 creature you choose to name. Afloat, I believe 
 I should rather enjoy whaling. Yet here I was 
 neither ashore nor afloat, and I saw no prospect 
 of a fight just the grim, hideous chance of get- 
 ting upset in midstream and falling a prey to 
 the kind of monster that attacks you when you 
 are most helpless and attacks from under cover 
 at that. For, even had not the dusk thickened 
 into something disgustingly like darkness, the 
 Pranhita was so muddy that crocodiles close to 
 its eddying surface would have been practically 
 invisible. 
 
 Don't tell me that I was stupid not to be em- 
 boldened by having so lately seen a native cross 
 that very ford. The native could hurry; how- 
 ever bloodcurdling his mortal peril, it was soon 
 over with, whereas, in our case, hurrying was
 
 TRAPPED AMONG CROCODILES 111 
 
 simply out of the question. Tired by a long, 
 hard pull through the jungle, our bullocks made 
 exasperatingly slow progress, and every now and 
 then they would calmly halt and drink, unaware 
 that, at any moment, some voracious, twelve-foot 
 crocodile might catch the scent and come like a 
 flash. 
 
 How our carts bumped and tilted as we made 
 our way out into that turbulent river! Slinging 
 the loads so high aboard them had brought up 
 the center of gravity to the danger point, if not 
 beyond it, and, the farther we went, the deeper 
 the water got and the swifter the current. Then, 
 too, the bigger were the loose rocks the Pranhita 
 rolled along its bottom. A dozen times my cart 
 struck stones, heeled over, and, after all but 
 upsetting, somehow righted itself. A dozen 
 times my heart was in my mouth. And now 
 the peril from drifting logs increased appallingly, 
 for, with the quickened current, they rushed 
 past us at redoubled speed. What if one should 
 hit? 
 
 As it grew darker, a thing happened that by 
 no means tended to relieve my anxieties; down- 
 stream, only a short distance away, the crocodiles
 
 112 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 set up a hoarse, reptilian hullaballoo, half croak- 
 ing, half barking, and whenever the bullocks 
 halted and the rattle and creak of our carts ceased 
 for a moment, we would hear the unamiable 
 chorus. It got on my nerves. It was gruesome 
 and seemingly unnatural. Familiar as I was 
 with the sound, I had never got reconciled to it. 
 I don't know why, but one expects silence of rep- 
 tiles or at most nothing louder than the swish 
 of the hooded cobra or its hiss. 
 
 We were about halfway across the river, when, 
 all of a sudden, the first cart stopped with a jerk 
 that nearly snapped the bullocks' yoke, and the 
 driver shouted, ff Ek putr ahe, sahib!" "There 
 is a great rock, sir !" No mistake, the wheel was 
 nicely "chocked" by a stone as big as a bushel 
 basket, directly in the track. The off bullock 
 kept pulling. In the boiling current, the top- 
 heavy cart swung round, with one wheel still 
 blocked, straight toward the crocodiles. 
 
 "Tamba! Tamba!" "Stop! Stop !" yelled 
 the driver, yanking furiously at the rope tied 
 through the bullock's tender nose. Up went the 
 animal's head, and he stopped just in time. 
 
 I sprang into the water it was up to my arm-
 
 I SPRANG INTO THE WATER, AND PLUNGED HEADLONG 
 TOWARD THE STALLED CART.
 
 TRAPPED AMONG CROCODILES 113 
 
 pits, nearly and plunged headlong toward the 
 stalled cart, and I remember noticing as I did so 
 that the crocodiles no longer barked and croaked. 
 Had they caught the scent? Were they coming? 
 
 It was a mere momentary shudder, for there 
 is something bracing, mentally and morally as 
 well as physically, in a leap into cool water, and 
 something tonic in the struggle to keep one's foot- 
 ing there. I reached the cart. I laid hold of the 
 obstructed wheel. With all my might I lifted. 
 But these bullock carts are clumsy affairs, with 
 solid wooden wheels, made by sawing a tree 
 trunk across, and there was the driver's weight 
 added to that of the cart, and the weight 
 of baggage added to the driver's. Try how I 
 would, I was unable to budge the thing- until the 
 restless night bullock began pulling, and then up 
 the wheel moved over the stone and down 
 square on my foot. Wheel and foot sank deep 
 into the mud. The bullock stopped pulling. I 
 was pinned fast, with my back to the crocodiles. 
 
 Since then, I have thought of at least half a 
 dozen clever things I might have done, but, even 
 if I had had them clearly in mind at the time, 
 I doubt if I should have done them, the pain was
 
 114 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 so excruciating. Instead, I shouted for help. 
 
 Instantly there were fine splashes in the water, 
 as three courageous native Christians sprang 
 overboard and rushed to liberate me. Several 
 logs spun by while they were coming, and an 
 object certainly not a log, for it was going up- 
 stream went past me, close by, leaving a wake 
 of ghastly eddies. A crocodile? I thought so 
 then, and believed my last hour had arrived. 
 
 They say that drowning people review in a 
 flash their entire lives, and I fancy the saying is 
 a true one, for I had an experience a trifle re- 
 sembling it, there in the muddy water with my 
 foot pinned fast and with hungry monsters ready 
 to eat me. A thousand memories crowded upon 
 one another, but only memories of my work in 
 India and of boys I had known there, and the 
 faces of those boys were like the faces of a close- 
 packed multitude filling the whole length and 
 breadth of my consciousness. One face alone 
 my little son's was white. And how distinct, 
 how real, the others were! I saw dark-skinned 
 Paulus, and "Buffalo Bill," and Gani, and all 
 the rest boys taken from among lepers and from j 
 among the water buffaloes and from among wild
 
 TRAPPED AMONG CROCODILES 115 
 
 beasts in the jungle; boys cast off in babyhood 
 by their parents and left to die and rescued just 
 in time; boys picked up in starving villages in 
 the day of famine or saved from villages where 
 cholera or the plague meant death to any who 
 remained there. 
 
 It is true that many of them were still boys 
 in fact, a goodly number were then at the Meth- 
 odist orphanage school but even those who had 
 grown to splendid young manhood and were 
 valiantly helping us to fight heathenism in India 
 had childish faces once more. I suppose it was 
 because I had specialized on boys ever since the 
 beginning of my work and developed a huge love 
 for them. Seeing them now, so vividly, gave an 
 added terror to my plight, for it was an awful 
 prospect, this, of having my career cut short be- 
 fore I could know how the majority of those 
 blessed youngsters would turn out. Do you ap- 
 preciate? We had given them their only chance 
 at liberation from a system of cruel tyranny cen- 
 turies old a tyranny that denied them educa- 
 tion, doomed them to abject poverty and wretch- 
 edness, and forbade them to rise, their sole of- 
 fense being that they were born into an outcaste
 
 116 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 tribe lower than the lowest caste in an order of 
 society where caste is everything. Right in the 
 midst of that atrocious order of society, we had 
 set them free. What now? Would they reward 
 us for all this by making good? Time would tell. 
 How I wanted time years and years and years 
 of it to see my boys gain positions of distinction 
 and influence and finally help to overthrow the 
 whole outrageous structure of Hinduism! It is 
 possible that missionaries now working in India 
 will live to behold precisely that. I wanted to 
 be one of them. 
 
 It seemed as if an age went by before my men 
 were at my side, lifting the heavy cart wheel off 
 my foot, and turning me loose, but now hurrah 
 for those splendid native Christians and their 
 pluck! They fairly dragged me through the 
 water, back to my cart, and in I climbed, rejoic- 
 ing, as our caravan started again. 
 
 It is curious how a man's mind will act in an 
 affair like this. While I was up to my neck in 
 muddy water, and pinned fast there, and, as it 
 seemed to me, certain to perish, I reckoned only 
 with the consequences of disaster. But now, 
 when I was once more high, if not dry, in my
 
 TRAPPED AMONG CROCODILES 117 
 
 cart, I shook with terror, for, instead of seeing 
 the bright, handsome, brown faces of Hindu 
 boys, I saw in imagination the wide-open, sickly- 
 pink mouths of man-eating crocodiles. One con- 
 fronts peril readily enough at the moment ; after- 
 ward, it horrifies and unnerves, and you would 
 have laughed if you had seen how, drenched with 
 muddy water though I was, I struggled to keep 
 my place on the bamboo rods that still left an 
 inch or so of space between them and the raging 
 Pranhita. Not by bribe or threat or anything 
 short of brute force could you have made me dip 
 so much as a left toe into that river again. 
 
 It is curious, too, that, even in this affrighted 
 mood, I should have fallen to wondering why 
 Hindus call the crocodile a "mugger" and figur- 
 ing out an explanation that is probably all wrong. 
 I said to myself, "Perhaps they have heard Eng- 
 lishmen or Americans use the vulgar slang word 
 'mug' for an ugly face, and as the crocodile has 
 an ugly face that reaches a third of the way back 
 to his ugly tail, christened him accordingly" 
 a reasonable guess, as guesses go, but a guess not 
 by any means calculated to relieve my distress 
 of mind. I hated to think of that "mug."
 
 118 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 Armed with innumerable, hideously sharp teeth# 
 it was a horror. To be seized by it and dragged 
 away to one's death beneath the Pranhita can 
 you conceive of any fate more abominable? 
 
 It was getting dark. The jungle along the 
 opposite shore looked dank and blackish, and 
 suggested the presence of wild beasts, which were 
 probably there in considerable numbers, but oh, 
 how I longed to reach it! We were making fair 
 progress. A little more, and the Pranhita would 
 be shallower; then a little more and we should 
 approach terra firma. I grew cheerful. I said 
 to myself, "Buck up, old man! The worst is 
 over." 
 
 But what was this? Swarms of flies had tor- 
 mented our bullocks since the start, yet we had 
 thought little of it, though the bullocks had, and 
 at last one of mine found a nice, simple, con- 
 venient way to escape flies by lying down! 
 and sank into the stream, with only his nose 
 above water. Round swung my cart, instantly, 
 hit by a floating log and over it tilted and nearly 
 upset, and I knew that presently bullocks, cart, 
 driver, missionary and all would be adrift among 
 the crocodiles.
 
 TRAPPED AMONG CROCODILES 119 
 
 "Shimpi puckare!""Twisi his tail 1" I 
 shouted to the driver, for that is how we crar 
 up our jungle flivver, and I confess that I 
 still unable to understand how the fellow m 
 aged to obey my order, though somehov 
 flung himself over in a feat worthy 
 contortionist, grabbed the bullock's t 
 the water, and twisted it furiously. 
 
 VI: BalUa and the Bandit 
 
 h. 
 
 hita 
 
 bullock 
 
 angry kick. 
 
 his mate with him. 
 
 mighty splashing, ai 
 
 lowed close. It was a i
 
 IA 120 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 Arn and> a ^ *^ e w hil e m y driver's teeth kept gnaw- 
 it wasP^ at *^ at ta ^' and more and more Pranhita 
 away to 1 * down his disgusted throat. Tilting, bump- 
 you cone l urcnm g our carts at l ast reached the op- 
 It was efe an k thanks to ox-tail soup on the run! 
 opposite shorf ched our tents under a ^ eai ban Y an 
 suggested the p ot a fire ^ oin ^' to kee P off wild beasts, 
 probably there L for a lon ^ time in front of ii: ' ^^ 
 how I longed to reach it! We were mak h J!|' J could 
 progress. A little more, and the Pranhita would 
 be shallower; then a little more and we should 
 approach terra firma. I grew cheerful. I said 
 to myself, "Buck up, old man! The worst is 
 over." 
 
 But what was this? Swarms of flies had tor- 
 mented our bullocks since the start, yet we had 
 thought little of it, though the bullocks had, and 
 at last one of mine found a nice, simple, co- 
 venient way to escape flies by lying dowr> 
 and sank into the stream, with only his 
 above water. Round swung my cart, inst 
 hit by a floating log and over it tilted p- 
 upset, and I knew that present 1 
 driver, missionary and all wo- 
 the crocodiles.
 
 VI: BalUa and the Bandit
 
 VI 
 
 Ballia and the Bandit 
 
 f I iHE finest thriller at the movies is often 
 JL an affair of life and death at the brink 
 of a yawning chasm, but the effect is a good 
 deal softened by your knowledge that, when 
 the awful climax comes and the victim is about 
 to be flung headlong into the abyss, they -sub- 
 stitute a dummy. 
 
 There was no dummy in Ballia's case ; instead 
 there was a live Hindu boy. Seven years and 
 more I had known him, and this is how we first 
 got acquainted. Perhaps you remember a story 
 of mine about helping to liberate a thousand cap- 
 tive Hindus who were toiling in misery and with- 
 out pay at a manganese mine. We settled them 
 on a big industrial farm, you recall, and among 
 them was Ballia, a plucky little fellow who had 
 unlimited good spirits in him despite privation 
 and abuse. He caught my attention at the very 
 
 123
 
 124 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 outset. "Look, sahib" he said, proudly, "I've 
 had the smallpox," and, sure enough, his jolly 
 brown face was all pock-marked. If there is 
 anything certain to win a missionary's sympathy, 
 it is that ; for, as a general rule, it represents one 
 of the most tragical institutions of heathenism 
 namely, the worship of the smallpox goddess, 
 Devi. 
 
 I could readily guess how Ballia had caught 
 the smallpox. It is common in India as com- 
 mon, almost, as measles and the toothache are 
 here but heathenism makes the natives do every- 
 thing in their power to help the disease spread. 
 It is a "sacred" disease an affliction to be sought 
 after and the ugly marks it leaves are looked 
 upon as a badge of honor. In Kamtee there is 
 a temple where the smallpox goddess has an 
 image, in front of which you will see tiny vessels 
 filled with smallpox scales brought there as offer- 
 ings to Devi. While I was serving as a chap- 
 lain of the British army ( I am as good an Ameri- 
 can as you are, but every Sunday morning I went 
 and talked to the British Tommies) I used to 
 ride past that temple, and see the smallpox suf- 
 ferers worshipping there, and swarms of flies
 
 BALLIA AND THE BANDIT 125 
 
 buzzing around them, and blackening the whole 
 front of the filthy old edifice. And 'whenever 
 smallpox breaks out in a Hindu village, a grand 
 feast is prepared, and all the neighbors are en- 
 thusiastically invited in to catch the disease if 
 they can. It was after a party of that sort that 
 Ballia came down with it, much to .his family's 
 delight. 
 
 I pitied the boy from the bottom of my heart, 
 and, the more he boasted of his pock-marked face, 
 the deeper my sympathy grew and the stronger 
 my interest, for I said to myself, "When this 
 youngster becomes a Christian and understands 
 what monstrous idiocies heathenism prescribes 
 and enforces, he will want to go out and fight 
 heathenism, tooth and nail." Wasn't that good 
 logic? Heathenism had disfigured him. It had 
 all but cost him his life. It was a curse and an 
 abomination. When Ballia opened his eyes to 
 that hideous fact, then, without fail, there would 
 be a mighty change in Ballia. 
 
 I had not long to wait. After a few days, our 
 thousand ex-captives bolted Hinduism in a body 
 and turned Christian, Ballia along with them, 
 and he began to realize what a shocking outrage
 
 126 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 he had been subjected to. I think it was this, 
 more than any other one thing, that made him 
 want to be a missionary, himself, and induced 
 him to study faithfully in the school we opened 
 at our industrial farm. But Ballia was not bril- 
 liant in fact, he was a dull boy, rather, and, in- 
 stead of developing the qualities that make a 
 speaker, seemed destined only to become a work- 
 man. I was sorry. I had expected much more 
 of him. And yet a Christian workman in India 
 may exert great influence, especially if he has 
 courage. We were soon to learn that our dull, 
 plodding, pock-marked little Ballia had courage 
 in abundance. 
 
 During a visit at the big farm (I used to run 
 down there from our Methodist mission station 
 in Nagpur pretty frequently) I heard that a 
 gigantic outlaw a native six feet five and re- 
 nowned for thievery and deeds of violence had 
 been looting our storehouse. One evening Ballia 
 caught him at it. Aware that he was seen, the 
 wretch sprang at Ballia, nabbed him by the 
 throat, threw him down, choked him almost into 
 insensibility, and threatened him with bloody
 
 BALLIA AND THE BANDIT 127 
 
 murder if he ever dared breathe a word to any- 
 one. Poor Ballia crept away half dead. 
 
 As soon as he could get to his feet and walk, 
 he came straight to me with the story. Not only 
 that; he accompanied me that night when I 
 called at the nearest police station and turned in 
 a complaint against the bandit who had almost 
 taken his life. 
 
 Not long afterwards the bandit was captured 
 (it took several men to arrest him) and dragged 
 before the judge of the Tahsile for trial, and 
 among the witnesses summoned to appear against 
 him was Ballia indeed, Ballia was the star wit- 
 ness, for, while others of us had circumstantial 
 evidence to offer, he alone had seen the marauder 
 actually committing his depredations. 
 
 Ordinarily, a criminal in India has no very 
 overwhelming dread of testimony by natives, but 
 when the native is a Christian the thing becomes 
 serious, for then a judge will believe him. As 
 soon as the burly giant got out on bail (how he 
 secured bail I never knew, yet somehow he man- 
 aged to) his first care was to hunt up Ballia. 
 He kicked him, beat him, and choked him, try- 
 ing to make him promise not to tell the court
 
 128 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 what he had seen, but Ballia kept saying, "I'm 
 not going to lie for you," and stuck it out to the 
 end, and when -we found him he was a terribly 
 mauled boy, bleeding from a dozen wounds. 
 
 It was a thoroughly dramatic scene in court 
 that trial a gigantic brute of an outlaw in the 
 prisoner's dock, a little, pock-marked boy on the 
 witness stand. All during Ballia's examination 
 and cross-examination, the infuriated bandit 
 glared malice and ferocity at him, as much as 
 to say, "Kid, you'll pay for this with your life" 
 which was literally and exactly what he meant, 
 and if he meant it then he meant it still more 
 when he heard his sentence: Six years in the 
 penitentiary. Before he was put away for the 
 six long years, his brother came to Ballia with a 
 message. The bandit, according to the message, 
 had sworn a great oath to come back, when his 
 term was up, and kill Ballia. 
 
 The boy laughed. Six years are a very consid- 
 erable time. At its termination Ballia might be 
 hard to find, and the criminal dead and gone, and 
 the danger past forever. Besides, in six years 
 Ballia would have got well on toward young man-
 
 I SHOUTED "l,OOK OUT, MAN, OR YOU'RE A GONER! 
 BUT HE PAID NO ATTENTION! 
 
 THE WRETCH SPRANG AT 
 BALLIA.
 
 BALLIA AND THE BANDIT 129 
 
 hood and could perhaps wallop a bandit or so, 
 himself. 
 
 After the affair in court, he went back to his 
 studies with renewed energy and ambition, as 
 it seemed to me but it is certain that he had a 
 greatly increased influence, for the other boys 
 appreciated his courage and admired it. At his 
 books, however, he was still slow, and we decided 
 at last that further study on Ballia's part would 
 be time wasted. Better put him to work. 
 
 So Ballia came to Nagpur and took a job as 
 driver of the mission cart. It was a humble oc- 
 cupation, in a way, but consider. Out went that 
 cart through jungles alive with wild beasts. 
 Only a brave fellow like Ballia could be trusted 
 to drive it. Then, too, driving the cart kept Bal- 
 lia in contact with the natives and if he lacked 
 the genius to address crowds and win them away 
 from heathenism, he could tackle the natives one 
 by one, and did frequently with magnificent re- 
 sult. 
 
 The long six years went by, and we had almost 
 forgotten about the imprisoned bandit when I set 
 out one day for our industrial farm, taking along 
 Ballia as driver. It is true that we spoke of the
 
 130 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 big convict, but our remarks were jocose now, as 
 we had ceased to have any real dread of him, 
 and neither Ballia nor I could recall the exact 
 date of his incarceration. It never occurred to 
 us that, as a matter of grim and ugly fact, the 
 sixth anniversary of that date was close at hand. 
 Nor did anyone at the farm seem to know or care. 
 Interest centered, not in the gigantic criminal 
 soon to be let loose, but in another marauder al- 
 ready at large an unusually annoying leopard 
 that had taken up headquarters on an island in 
 the river just below Taranpur. 
 
 You don't see the connection between all 
 this and the movie thriller I spoke of at the be- 
 ginning? Of course you don't, and no more did 
 I, or I should not have set forth alone for a shot 
 at that leopard, a day or two later, and left Bal- 
 lia to take care of himself as best he could. How 
 desperately he needed a bodyguard, armed to 
 the teeth, I little realized, for no one in the neigh- 
 borhood was aware that the giant bandit had re- 
 gained his liberty and, with murder in his heart, 
 even now roamed the jungle in search of a pock- 
 marked Hindu lad. 
 
 How gaily I started out that morning! I love
 
 BALLIA AND THE BANDIT 131 
 
 a leopard hunt as dearly as I hate a leopard and, 
 while making my way toward the island, I re- 
 called with considerable pride some shots I had 
 taken at wild creatures of that breed. Not many 
 weeks before, I was touring the jungle in our 
 mission cart, and quite a rabble of natives tagged 
 behind for sake of the protection my rifle af- 
 forded. There was several young mothers in the 
 crowd, cringing and shuddering as they clutched 
 their babies tight, well knowing that at any mo- 
 ment some beast in quest of a toothsome morsel 
 might spring upon them before I could get a 
 chance to fire. Suddenly from the lips of a 
 tawny, lithe woman with a babe at her breast 
 came a shriek of "Dekho, sahib! Ek moti beebut 
 hai!" "Look, master! There is a great leop- 
 ard!" I looked, and yonder in the road behind 
 us stood the spotted beauty, head up, listening 
 hungrily to an infant's wails. A Mohammedan 
 in the crowd said, "Sir, he has been following us 
 all 'the afternoon ; I meant to tell you of it." 
 How coolly they take such things! 
 
 I ordered my men to go on ahead while I 
 stopped and hid in the tiger grass beside the road 
 waiting for a shot. They made a great fuss and
 
 132 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 begged me not to run such risks, but, as I in- 
 sisted, they went on. Instead of mere tiger 
 grass, I found a bush twenty feet from the road 
 and under that bush I hid, face down. 
 
 Carefully I figured the distance and the leop- 
 ard's probable pace and the minutes as they 
 passed, and when I thought the beast must be 
 directly in front of me I raised my head. Capi- 
 tal! There he was, slowly walking past, only a 
 step or two beyond the place where I had ex- 
 pected him to be. A true shot right into his shoul- 
 der, and all was over, as the soft, flat bullet mush- 
 roomed out, and, smashing the bone, pierced the 
 heart. Wild and hilarious, then, was the joy of 
 the crowd. They came rushing back and formed 
 a ring around their fallen foe, and leaped and 
 danced, and offered the dead beast all manner of 
 indignities, while the mothers fondly kissed their 
 babes and thanked me for protecting them. 
 
 This, of course, was a pleasant thing to remem- 
 ber, but not all my affairs with leopards had 
 ended as satisfactorily, and there was one in par- 
 ticular that still rankled. I was showing some 
 lantern pictures to a crowd of natives in a jungle 
 village one night and had stretched the screen
 
 BALLIA AND THE BANDIT 133 
 
 between two trees right next the wild jungle it- 
 self. The people were seated on the grass and, 
 judging by their enthusiastic ejaculations of 
 "Are bapre" they were enjoying the show enor- 
 mously. After I had exhibited all my American 
 views, I tried them with a few animal pictures, 
 and when I displayed a photograph of a fine 
 spotted beast, the people shouted appreciatively, 
 ff Dekho } beebut hair "See! It's a leopard." 
 I left it on for several minutes, as they seemed 
 to like it, and behold! right around the corner 
 of the screen walked a live leopard and stood 
 gazing at the picture. Evidently he had seen it 
 from the jungle side, as it shone through, and 
 had mistaken it for one of his kind and come to 
 investigate. With a mighty yell, the men tum- 
 bled over one another in their haste to get away, 
 while the leopard, as much surprised as they, 
 slunk off into the jungle and vanished before 
 I could run six steps toward our carts for my 
 rifle. Too bad! I registered a vow then and 
 there that the next leopard to cross my path 
 should not escape me so easily. 
 
 Besides, I have a personal rancor against leop- 
 ards, not without good reason. One sizzling hot
 
 134 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 night, while I was away, my wife and babies were 
 sleeping out under strong nets, and, along about 
 midnight, Mrs. Musser awoke with a feeling of 
 insecurity, and sat up in her cot, and there, sniff- 
 ing close to the babies' bed, stood a big leopard 
 in the moonlight. She shouted and clapped her 
 hands, and the brute slipped away down a near- 
 by ravine, but I protest that this sort of thing is 
 too serious by far. 
 
 I had it in for leopards ever after, and you will 
 easily enough understand my mood as I set out 
 for the island just below Taranpur, quite un- 
 mindful of Ballia, who remained behind. I came 
 to a deep pool, out of which jutted big rocks, 
 where huge crocodiles lay basking in the sun- 
 shine. Upstream a little way there was a foam- 
 ing cataract. 
 
 Above the cataract, I found that there was an 
 island in the stream as nearly as I could judge, 
 the very island where, according to report, the 
 leopard had established himself. On the farther 
 side of the island, the current ran swift and deep, 
 frothing at the foot of a tall and almost per- 
 pendicular cliff. On the side toward me, it was 
 swift but shallow, and a man could cross over.
 
 BALLIA AND THE BANDIT 135 
 
 I crossed. Warily I prowled the forest that 
 covered the island, searching, as I went, for evi- 
 dences that the leopard had been there and little 
 recking that I was soon to face a human beast 
 of prey far more cruel than any leopard. But 
 look! Who and what was that yonder at the 
 brink of the cliff, across the further branch of 
 stream? A man a man of unusual size and 
 staggering! 
 
 Through the veil of tropical foliage along the 
 cliff, I saw him stagger, but I failed to recognize 
 that he carried a heavy burden. I thought he 
 must be drunk. 
 
 It was by no means an absurd conjecture. 
 Only a short while before, I had seen what a 
 monstrous curse drink is in India. Away down 
 in the jungles, six days' journey from the nearest 
 railway station, we were traveling along the 
 palm-shaded road. You have seen palms in hot- 
 houses and botanical gardens; here they grow 
 wild, some as tall as a house, some barely a foot 
 high, while the most beautiful rose twenty feet 
 from the ground and had a leaf spread twenty 
 feet across, and on all sides the clusters of coco- 
 nuts hung with their brown hulls, three-cornered,
 
 136 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 just below the great central bud, the living flower 
 of the tree. As we came to a field of these splen- 
 did trees, all planted in rows or groups, I saw 
 a village in the middle of the grove twenty mud 
 houses, full of holes, their roofs covered with 
 grass, dry and yellow. Not a man, woman, or 
 child was to be seen. I said to our guide, "Is 
 this a deserted village?" He answered, "No 
 sahib; it's a toddy town." We walked through 
 it. The trees all had tiny bamboo ladders tied 
 to their trunks with fiber rope, and at the top of 
 each coconut palm there was a great gash cut, 
 and into this gash was thrust a bamboo drain 
 pipe, and at the end of it a pot was tied to catch 
 the sap. From that sap the natives made a dia- 
 bolically intoxicating drink. 
 
 In the first house I entered lay a man, his wife, 
 and three children aged nine and ten and a baby 
 two years old, all sodden drunk. I shook the 
 man, but his head wagged to and fro, and he 
 never even opened his eyes. I picked up the baby. 
 It was impossible to awaken it, and the poor 
 little creature's breath smelt strong of toddy. 
 The other children lay like dead in a heap of 
 filthy rags.
 
 BALLIA AND THE BANDIT 137 
 
 From house to house I went, trying to find 
 someone awake, but all were drunk and helpless. 
 Sometimes an old man and an old woman were 
 the sole occupants of a dirty hovel; sometimes I 
 found only a man and a dog, and always the huts 
 were filthy beyond words, for the drunken stu- 
 por lasts for months as soon as a native comes 
 back to semi-consciousness he drinks again and 
 lies down. The contrast between the beautiful 
 palms and the squalor and degradation in the vil- 
 lage beneath them seemed like a spoken protest 
 against the desecration of a lovely spot "where 
 every prospect pleases and only man is vile." 
 
 Remembering the experience so vividly, I nat- 
 urally thought first of drunkenness when I saw 
 the huge fellow on the cliff stagger toward its very 
 brink. A moment more and he might lose his 
 footing completely, fall into the stream below, 
 and be swept over the cataract into the crocodile 
 pool, where death was certain. 
 
 I shouted in Telegu, "Look out, man, or you're 
 a goner!" but he paid no attention he was too 
 drunk, I concluded. 
 
 There are times when it comes in handy to be 
 a crack shot with a rifle, as some poor fellow's
 
 138 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 life may depend on your skill. One evening a 
 friend of mine, an engineer, was sitting out on 
 my piazza, and a black panther sneaked up in 
 the dark, grabbed him before he could wink, and 
 made off with him into the pitchy darkness. I 
 dashed to the rescue. There was a scuffle. I 
 could hear it. Presently, the man, with the beast 
 on top of him, crawled into a streak of light from 
 the door I had left open as I ran out. I raised 
 my rifle, and, with my heart in my mouth and my 
 blood running cold, let drive. Hurrah! The 
 bullet missed the man and killed the panther. 
 If I could trust my aim in a crisis like that, it 
 seemed to me that I could trust it now. Shouts 
 failed to stop the big Hindu on the cliff, but I 
 had a notion that bullets would succeed, as even 
 a drunken man will respect bullets, and reasoned 
 that anybody drunk enough to stagger in that 
 style would be too stupid to see that the shots 
 were mere warnings. 
 
 I realized, of course, that I ran awful risks of 
 hitting him, but consider; he had to be stopped 
 otherwise he was practically doomed. The 
 first shot went over his head, as I intended it to. 
 He must have heard it sing. Yet he came on,
 
 BALLIA AND THE BANDIT 139 
 
 lurching and reeling, just as if nothing had hap- 
 pened. I gave him another, a couple of yards to 
 one side of him, and saw it kick up the dirt. Still 
 he came on. The third shot, hitting closer than 
 I intended it to, struck directly before his feet. 
 At that, he dropped his burden on the ground, 
 straightened up to a gigantic height, and, with 
 a yell of hideous rage, turned and fled not stag- 
 gering, either, and I saw in a flash that he had 
 been sober all along. No amount of scare could 
 bring a man out of crazy intoxication as quickly 
 as that. 
 
 There on the ground at the top of the cliff lay 
 the burden he had dropped a queer sort of bur- 
 den about six feet long and enclosed in a coarse 
 sack. I gazed at it intently, trying to guess what 
 it was, and after a moment or two I saw it move, 
 and then for the first time I understood what 
 the whole thing meant. 
 
 About two hundred yards upstream from 
 where I stood, there was a shallow place where, 
 despite the rapids foaming over loose rocks and 
 threatening to carry you over the cataract, it 
 seemed possible to get across. I chanced it. 
 Twice I slipped and fell in, and oh, the relief
 
 140 JUNGLE TALES 
 
 when I reached the opposite bank and found a 
 gully through which I could clamber up to the 
 top. Dripping, breathless, and horror-stricken, 
 I ran along the cliff to the spot where our bandit 
 had dropped his burden. 
 
 It was not moving now. No sound came from 
 it. As I bent down to rip open the sack, I 
 thought, "Too late! I've saved the big outlaw, 
 but not his victim." 
 
 Yet see! When I slashed the sack with my 
 hunting knife, there was the pock-marked face 
 of a Hindu lad, and, while he was unable to 
 speak, as his assailant had gagged him, his eye- 
 lids quivered and I knew he was alive. 
 
 It was quite a job getting him free. After 
 beating him horribly, the giant had bound him 
 hand and foot and trussed him up like a fowl, in 
 which condition Ballia was to have gone over the 
 cliff movie style, only more so with a water- 
 fall waiting him and, after that, the crocodiles. 
 "Some scenario" as movie goers say; let the 
 producers beat it if they can. 
 
 The outlaw's subsequent career was a brief 
 one hideous while it lasted, though soon over 
 but Ballia's had hardly more than begun. I said,
 
 BALLIA AND THE BANDIT 141 
 
 "Ballia, I think this escape means that you were 
 intended for great things. You're no spell- 
 binder, I realize ; you can't sway a crowd ; but you 
 can drag Hindus out of Hinduism one at a time 
 with bigger results than ever before. Go to it!" 
 He did and made good. 
 
 THE END
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 HTDLD 
 
 JUL22 
 
 NO^MiVABLE 
 
 MAY 2 3 
 DUE 2 WKS FROM D^TE RECEIVED 
 
 Form L9-42m-8,'49 (35573)444 
 
 THK LIBRARY 
 
 lvi ^jA 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 PS 
 
 3525 
 
 M971J