The mahouts and hunters smelt more or less of civilization and were convinced for their part that the disposition of the little light-coloured elephant was beyond redemption.
“He is a born rogue,” was their verdict, and they meant by that, a particular kind of elephant, sometimes a young male, more often an old and savage tusker, alone in the jungle—apart from the herd. Solitariness doesn’t improve their dispositions, and they were generally expelled from a herd for ill-temper to begin with. “Woe to the fool prince who buys this one!” said the grey-beard catchers. “There is murder in his eyes.”
But Langur Dass would only look wise when he heard these remarks. He knew elephants. The gleam in the dark eyes of Muztagh was not viciousness, but simply inheritance, a love of the wide wild spaces that left no room for ordinary friendships.
But calf-love and mother-love bind other animals as well as men, and possibly he might have perfectly fulfilled the plans Dugan had made for him but for a mistake the sahib made in the little calf’s ninth year.
He sold Muztagh’s mother to an elephant-breeder from a distant province. Little Muztagh saw her march away between two tuskers—down the long elephant trail into the valley and the shadow.
“Watch the little one closely to-night,” Dugan Sahib said to his mahout. So when they had led him back and forth along the lines, they saw that the ends of his ropes were pegged down tightly. They were horsehair ropes, far beyond the strength of any normal nine-year-old elephant to break. Then they went to the huts and to their women and left him to shift restlessly from foot to foot, and think.
Probably he would have been satisfied with thinking, for Muztagh did not know his strength, and thought he was securely tied. The incident that upset the mahout’s plans was simply that the wild elephants trumpeted again from the hills.
Muztagh heard the sound, long drawn and strange from the silence of the jungle. He grew motionless. The great ears pricked forward, the whipping tail stood
