The Three Sapphires

Lord Victor moved a little to one side, as if his volatile spirits felt a dampening, the depression of a buried past; and Prince Ananda, turning his Arab, drew Swinton along to his side by saying: "Have you come in contact with the cleavage of religious fanaticism in India, captain?"

"My experience was only of the army; there the matter of Hindu or Mussulman is now better understood and better arranged," Swinton answered cautiously as he and Ananda rode forward side by side.

The captain was puzzled. Training had increased the natural bent of his mind toward a suspicious receptivity where he felt there was necessity. He had decided that the prince, with Oriental lethargy, never acted spontaneously – that there was something behind every move he made; his halt, back on the road, was evidently to make a change from Lord Victor to himself in their alignment. Temporarily the captain fancied that the prince might wish to draw from him some account of the preceding night's adventure. Indeed, as a Raj horse had probably been killed, Ananda could not have missed hearing of the accident.

It was Lord Victor's voice that stirred these thoughts to verbal existence. "I say, Prince Ananda," he suddenly asked, "did you hear that my mentor had been devoured by a tiger last night?"

As if startled into a remembrance, Ananda said: "Sorry, captain, I forgot to ask if anything did happen you last night. My master of horse reported this morning that your pony was found with a broken leg at the foot of a cliff; then I heard that you had gone off with the major, so knew you were all right. You see, well" – the prince spoke either in genuine or assumed diffidence – "as it was a Raj pony that came to grief I couldn't very well speak of it; that is, knowing that you were all right."

"When I heard it," Gilfain broke in, "remembering what you had said about the hunting leopard, I was deuced well bashed, I assure you."

"Was there – anything – in the report of – a tiger trying to maul you?" the prince asked, and Swinton, tilting his helmet, found the luminous black eyes reading his face.

But Swinton could have been plotting murder behind those "farthing eyes" for all they betrayed as he answered: "I don't know what frightened the animal; he suddenly shied and I was thrown out, coming a cropper on my head which put me to sleep for a few minutes. When I came to the pony and cart had disappeared and there was nothing for it but go back to the major's bungalow for the night."

"Then there was nothing in the tiger story," the prince commented.

"I saw no tiger, anyway," Swinton declared, and Finnerty chuckled inwardly, for, like the captain, he had been mystified by Darpore's sudden interest in the latter.

The prince had presented something akin to a caste aloofness toward Swinton; now the change had tensed Finnerty's perceptions so that he took cognizance of things that ordinarily would have passed as trivial. He saw Ananda deliberately ride past the road that would have taken them to the magnificent courtyard entrance of the palace, the beautiful red rubble road that wound its way through crotons, oleanders, and hibiscus around the fairy Lake of the Golden Coin to cross the marble-arched bridge. Now they were following a road that led through the zoo to the back entrance. As they came to a massive teakwood gate, from the left of which stretched away in a crescent sweep a wall of cages – the first one at the very gatepost holding a fiend, a man-killing black leopard – the major pressed his mount close to the rump of Swinton's horse, upon the right of whom rode Prince Ananda. A guard saluted, an attendant swung the teakwood barrier inward, and while it was still but half open Ananda pressed forward, his horse carrying Swinton's with him into a holocaust of lightning-like happenings.

Swinton turned toward the prince at some word, and at that instant the latter's horse swerved against his mount, as if stung by a spur on the outside; a black arm, its paw studded with glittering claws, flashed through the bars of the cage with a sweep like a scimitar's, striking Swinton full in the chest, the curved claws hooking through his khaki coat and sweeping him half out of the saddle toward the iron bars against which he would be ripped to pieces in a second. With an oath, Finnerty's whip came down on his horse's flank, and the Irishman's body was driven like a wedge between the leopard and his prey; the thrusting weight tore the claws through the cloth of Swinton's coat, and, still clutching viciously, they slashed Finnerty across the chest, a gash the width of his chin showing they had all but torn through his throat.

Swinton pulled himself into the saddle and looked back at the major's blood-smeared chin and on beyond to the sinister black creature that stood up on his hind legs against the bars of his cage thrusting a forepaw through playfully as though it were only a bit of feline sport. He shuddered at the devilishness of the whole thing that looked so like another deliberate attempt. The prince would know that that black fiend, true to his jungle instincts, would be waiting in hiding behind the brick wall of his cage for a slash at any warm-blooded creature rounding the corner. They were a fighting pair, this black, murderous leopard and the prince. Finnerty was checking the blood flow on his chin with a handkerchief; his eyes, catching Swinton's as they turned from the leopard, were full of fierce anger.

There had been an outburst of grating calls and deep, reverberating roars as leopards and tigers, roused by the snarl of the black demon as he struck, gave vent to their passion.

As if stirred to ungovernable anger by the danger his friends had incurred through the gateman's fault, Ananda turned on the frightened man, and, raising his whip, brought it down across his back. Twice the lash fell, and two welts rose in the smooth black skin; this assault accompanied by a torrent of abuse that covered chronologically the native's ancestry back to his original progenitor, a jungle pig. Ananda's face, livid from this physical and mental assault, smoothed out with a look of contrite sorrow as he apologised to his companions.

"I'm awfully sorry, major; that fool nearly cost us a life by frightening my horse with his frantic efforts to open the gate. He's an opium eater, and must have been beating that leopard with his staff to have made him so suddenly vicious. Your coat is ripped, captain; are you wounded?"

"No, thanks!" Swinton answered dryly.

"You are, major."

"Nothing much – a scratch. I'll have to be careful over blood poisoning, that's all."

"Yes," the prince said, "I'll have my apothecary apply an antiseptic."

As they wound between a spurting fountain and a semicircle of iron-barred homes, a monkey dropped his black, spiderlike body from an iron ring in the ceiling, and, holding by a coil in the end of his tail, swung back and forth, head down, howling dismally. Bedlam broke forth in answer to this discordant wail.

"Delightful place!" Finnerty muttered as he rode at Swinton's elbow.

"Inferno and the archfiend!" And Swinton nodded toward the back of Prince Ananda, who rode ahead.

In the palace dispensary Finnerty brushed the apothecary to one side and treated his slashed chin with iodine; a rough treatment that effectually cleaned the cut at the bottom, which was the bone.

They did not tarry long over the champagne, and were soon in the saddle again. Finnerty asked his companions to ride on to his bungalow for an early dinner. Lord Victor declined, declaring he was clean bowled, but insisted that the captain should accept. As for himself, he was going to bed, being ghastly tired.

As Swinton and the major sat puffing their cheroots on the verandah after dinner, the latter gave a despairing cry of "Great Kuda!" as his eyes caught sight of the Banjara swinging up the road, evidently something of import flogging his footsteps. "We shall now be laughed at for not having bagged that tiger yesterday." Finnerty chuckled.

But the Lumbani was in no hurry to disburse whatever was in his mind, for he folded his black blanket on the verandah at the top step and sat down, salaaming in a most grave manner first. Finnerty and Swinton smoked and talked in English, leaving the tribesman to his own initiative. Presently he asked: "Is the young sahib who shot my dog present?"

Relief softened the austere cast of his bony face when Finnerty answered "No."

"It is as well," the Lumbani said, "for the young have not control of their tongues. But the sahib" – and the Banjara nodded toward Swinton, his eyes coming back to Finnerty's face – "is a man of discretion, is it not so, huzoor?"

To this observation the major agreed.

"And the sahib will not repeat what I tell?"

The Lumbani rubbed his long, lean hands up and down the length of his staff as though it were a fairy wand to ward off evil; his black, hawklike eyes swept the compound, the verandah, as much of the bungalow interior as they could; then pitching his voice so that it carried with wonderful accuracy just to the ears of the two men, he said: "There was a man beaten to-day at the gate of the tiger garden."

Neither of the sahibs answered, and he proceeded: "The gateman who was beaten is a brother to me; not a blood brother, sahib, but a tribe brother, for he is a Banjara of the Lumbani caste."

"By Jove!" The major clamped his jaws close after this involuntary exclamation and waited.

"Yes, sahib" – the Lumbani had noticed with satisfaction the major's start – "my brother has shown me the welts on his shoulder, such as are raised on a cart bullock, but he is not a bullock, being a Banjara."

There was a little silence, the native turning over in his mind something else he wished to say, trying to discover first what impression he had made, his shrewd eyes searching Finnerty's face for a sign. Suddenly, as if taking a plunge, he asked: "Does the sahib, who is a man, approve that the servant be beaten like a dog – even though the whip lay in the hands of a rajah?"

Finnerty hesitated. It is not well to give encouragement to a native against the ruling powers, whether they be black or white.

"And he was not at fault," the Banjara added persuasively; "he did not frighten the pony – it was the rajah's spur, for my brother saw blood on the skin of the horse where the spur had cut."

"Why didn't he open the gate wide; had he orders not to do so?" Finnerty asked quickly.

"Sahib, if the rajah had passed orders such as that he would not have struck a Banjara like a dog, lest there be telling of the orders; but the gate had been injured so that it would not open as always, and the tender did not know it."

"But the rajah did not know we'd be coming along at that time," the major parried.

"As to time, one day matters no more than another. The rajah would have invited you through that gate some time. But he did know you were up in the jungle, and rode forth to meet you."

"It was but a happening," Finnerty asserted, with the intent of extracting from the Lumbani what further evidence he had.

"When one thing happens many times it is more a matter of arrangement than of chance," the Banjara asserted.

"I don't understand," Finnerty declared.

"There is a window in the palace, sahib, directly in front of the gate, and it has been a matter of pastime for the rajah to sit at that window when somebody against whom he had ill will would be admitted and clawed by that black devil."

"Impossible!"

"It is not a new thing, sahib; my brother who was beaten knows of this."

Finnerty stepped into his room, and returning placed a couple of rupees in the ready palm of the Banjara, saying: "Your brother has been beaten because of us, so give him this."

The Lumbani rolled the silver in the fold of his loin cloth, and, indicating Swinton with his staff, said: "The sahib should not go at night to the hill, neither here nor there" – he swept an arm in the direction of the palace – "for sometimes that evil leopard is abroad at night."

Finnerty laughed.

The Banjara scowled: "As to that, the black leopard has had neither food nor water to-day, and if the sahibs sit up over the pool in Jadoo Nala they may see him drink."

"We'd see a jungle pig coming out of the fields, or a muntjac deer with his silly little bark, perhaps," Finnerty commented in quiet tolerance.

"Such do drink at the pool, but of these I am not speaking. The young man being not with you to disarrange matters, you might happen upon something of interest, sahib," the Banjara declared doggedly.

"We are not men to chase a phantom – to go and sit at Jadoo Pool because a herdsman has fallen asleep on the back of a buffalo and had a dream."

Behind a faint smile the Lumbani digested this. "Very well, sahib," he exclaimed presently, with definite determination; "I will speak. When my brother was beaten the dust was shaken from his ears and he has heard. Beside the big gate Darna Singh and his sister, the princess, talked to-day, and the speech was of those who would meet in secret at the pool to-night."

"Who meet there?"

"The rajah's name was spoken, sahib."

"How knew Darna Singh this?"

"There be always teeth that can be opened with a silver coin. Now," and the Lumbani gathered up his black blanket, throwing it over his shoulder, "I go to my herd, for there is a she-buffalo heavy in calf and to-night might increase the number of my stock."

"Have patience, Lumbani," Finnerty commanded, and as the Banjara turned to stand in waiting he added to Swinton: "What do you think, captain – we might learn something? But there's Lord Victor; he'll expect you home."

"I'll drop him a note saying we're going to sit up over the Jadoo Pool and to not worry if I don't get home to-night."

Finnerty brought pencil and paper, and when the note was written handed it to the Banjara, saying: "For the young sahib at the bungalow, and if he receives it you will be paid eight annas to-morrow."

The herdsman put the note in his loin cloth and strode away. At the turn where Swinton had been thrown from his dogcart he dropped the note over the cliff, explaining to the sky his reasons: "A hunt is spoiled by too many hunters. It is not well that the young sahib reads that they go to Jadoo Pool – it was not so meant of the gods – and as to the service, I have eaten no salt of the sahib's, having not yet been paid."

The old chap was naturally sure that Swinton had written in the note that the young sahib was to join them at the pool.

As he plodded downhill he formulated his excuse for nondelivery of the note. It would be that the she-buffalo had demanded his immediate care, and in all the worry and work it had been forgotten and then lost. It was well to have a fair excuse to tender a sahib who put Punjabi wrestlers on their backs.