by Talbot Mundy
“Always!” said Ommony, nodding.
“Female, naturally. The papers never did have Strange in a mix-up with a woman. There was a rumour one time, but Strange has teeth and they were afraid he’d soak them for libel. Couldn’t prove a thing; had to be satisfied antagonizing the woman vote by calling him a misogynist — which they did, till further orders.
“I was down to house-to-house canvassing. But I’d a pull with two or three hotel detectives, so I specialized on new arrivals, calling on ’em — camera with me. Funny lights are my long suit. Named a big figure, and agreed to shade it for the privilege of — all that hokum. That’s how I met Zelmira.”
“Sounds Italian,” said Ommony. “Come in to breakfast.”
“Greek,” said Charley, sitting down in the room where all four walls are draped with tiger-skins, and the only other ornament is a case of rifles in a corner. “Believe me, Zelmira Poulakis is the goods,” he went on between mouthfulls. “She’s a peach — over thirty, for you can’t fool me, but good to look at — and class if I know it. Must have money, too, if her jewellery and clothes are paid for. I got mine in advance, top-figure, and she didn’t try to beat me down a nickel. I exposed a dozen plates, and we got talking.”
Charley poured a whole cup-full of scalding coffee down his throat and signed to the hamal for more. Then he looked at Ommony, with that peculiar camera-man’s eye that sees effects between the shadow and the edge of sunlight.
“She’s like you,” he said suddenly. “You don’t mind what you tell her. I’ve heard since she had a past in Egypt or somewhere. Her husband was a crook, but that cuts no ice now she’s a widow. I fell for her hard, and got telling how I aimed to see the world with Meldrum Strange. She laughed and said she’d rather do that, too, than anything!
“If she’d been real crooked she’d have started in to play me right then, but she didn’t. I was the Weisenheimer. I told her how set I was on getting Meldrum’s picture, and she laughed. She said that ought to be easy enough. I was wondering just how to play the hand when she suddenly got cold feet and said right out that if I tried to blackmail Meldrum she’d never forgive herself for having as much as encouraged me.”
“I was wondering about that, too,” said Ommony. “Is Strange that kind of man?”
“You needn’t let it worry you!” said Charley, putting down his cup.
“All right,” said Ommony. “I apologise. It was your own fault, though. You might have made it clearer that—”
“Well, I made it clear to her; but I had the dickens of a time. She’s sweet on Meldrum or his money — both maybe; and he might do worse, or buy worse, any way you look at it. She swore she had no hold on him, but knew him well enough to ‘phone and invite him to call. So after she’d put me through a questionnaire that ‘ud make Edison look like Easy Street she agreed to tip me off. I went and lay low near the telephone for two days.”
“I should have thought you’d have made the round of newspaper offices,” ventured Ommony.
“No need. I knew what they’d pay, supposing I was fool enough to spill a good thing. I waited until she ‘phoned me, and you bet I was at the private entrance of that hotel an hour ahead of time. He got there half-an-hour ahead of time, and made for the door with a flunkey on each side, but I shot him twice and none of ’em saw me. Then I waited another hour and Lady Luck came across. Out comes Strange with Madame Zelmira Poulakis on his arm, both of ’em smiling, and I took one good shot before the flunkeys got wise. They didn’t say a word, but came for me to smash the camera; so I stepped into the hotel, where the detective was a friend of mine, and there wasn’t a thing they could do about it inside there. I guess they said nothing to Meldrum, for fear of their jobs — or if they did, maybe they said they’d smashed the camera.
“Anyway, I didn’t waste any time then. I developed and printed the pictures that night, and believe me, they were good. Next morning I put copies in an envelope with my calling card, and sent ’em up to Meldrum Strange’s private office, saying I’d wait for an answer. It wasn’t five minutes before he sent for me.
“‘How much d’you want?’ he demanded. He was scornful, and he had his cheque-book on the table. Got to hand it to him; he can eat crow good. I could have taxed him. He was three ways when I pulled out the negatives and broke them — pleased, surprised, and curious to see what card I’d play next.
“So I made no bones about it. I said right out I aimed to travel with him, and all I’d planned for was an interview. So he said, ‘Well, you’ve had your interview, and you’ve smashed your negatives. What if I turn you down now?’ And I said, ‘Go to it. Then I’ll know you’re not the kind of man I want to travel with.’ We hit it off good after that. He hired me at the end of fifteen minutes. I went and told Zelmira, and she let me buy the dinner just to celebrate.
“No glad rags, and no money. Had to do something about it. Sooner than bleat to anybody else I told her, and she was tickled — lent me the price and some over. I paid her out of the first cheque. Strange had me sworn not to say a word about his movements to anyone, so I didn’t drop a hint, although I saw Zelmira pretty often. But she understood; she isn’t like a Greek at all — downy, I dare bet, and up to her eyes in ambition, but on the level. She found out when he was going, and where; maybe she asked him; I don’t know.”
“But what did Strange come to India for?” asked Ommony.
“Open an office, I guess — Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta, Simla — he aims to be a sort of clearing house for information so’s to trip crooks before they get started — card indexes to beat the encyclopedia — everything in ’em from a man’s past to what he might do if the game looked good. Poker out of books, I’d call it, but that’s his affair. The funny part is this: he’d come away to give the papers and the public time to calm down and forget him, Zelmira Poulakis included. I know about her, because on the steamer coming out he asked me whether I’d let on to her about his Well, we hadn’t been in Bombay before she puts up at the same hotel!”
“Tagged him, eh?”
“No. We came by way of San Francisco and Hong-Kong. She took the English boat by way of New York and Port Said. But Strange wasn’t having any. He swore a blue streak and took the train that night — Delhi like a darned fool; she could go to Delhi. Who’s to stop her? She showed up at our hotel in Delhi — never made a move to interfere with Strange, but treated Grim and Jeff Ramsden like old friends. Strange caught me talking to her, so he shipped me off all over the place making dates for him, and I was in a place called Ahmednugger when I got a telegram a yard long telling me to see you and fix up tiger-shooting for him. He wants to hide and have a good time until Zelmira picks on someone else.”
“He heard of me, of course, from Athelstan King?”
“Oh, yes, and I’m to say King sends his compliments, do you mind?”
“Strange will have to rough it here,” said Ommony. “I’m no millionaire.”
Charley looked about him. “Seems you’ve got tigers,” he said. “I reckon Strange is killing mad!”
“How old is he?”
“‘Bout fifty — fifty-five — somewhere there. Too much stomach, but totes it himself. Doesn’t need a nurse yet. Say, you’ll like him for awhile at any rate. He’s real good company; there’s nothing wrong with him except his point of view,” said Charley, almost pleadingly. “King said—”
“I’d have him here for your sake,” Ommony interrupted, laughing. “You stay, of course?”
“That’s up to him. No orders about that yet. I’ve got my camera. Say, the gang told me you know animals from A to Issard.”
“And — ?”
“I’ve got special English plates, the best lens out of Jena, and scads o’ more plates in Bombay. All that’s needed is a dark room—”
“I can fix that up.”
“ — and the animals.”
“Make yourself at home,” said Ommony. “When will Strange be here? Better wire him, hadn’t I?”
Charley�
�s eyes, sky-bright with a hint of steel in them, met Ommony’s again and dwelt there half a second.
“If it’s all the same I’d sooner wire and you write,” he answered. “That’ll give us four days extra before he comes.”
Ommony laughed again. “All right. I’ve only one bath room so you mayn’t have that; but there’s running water, cool enough too, in a shed outside, and I’ll lend you two men to cover the shed with tar-paper; there’s lots of it in the shed.”
“They told me you were white!” said Charley, grinning.
II.— “I’M THINKING”
Art is individual, and knows no limits. Fools are they who sneer at new tools, and processes of giving form to idea. Ommony, an artist in his own way, paid suitable homage to Charley’s camera, because the thing of brass and glass and wood was the tool of a true enthusiast.
That forest and its outskirts are a thousand square miles. There are temples in it, not wholly ruinous but older than written history, and in places trees have forced themselves up from between the stones of forgotten cities. Men live there, known now as junglis, naked and afraid, whose ancestors were kings in lost Lemuria if the very ancient books are true. And the animals live where human pride one time adored itself.
Above all, there are spots of sunlight filtered through gaps in the foliage; and fire-lanes (Ommony’s first charge) along which light flows like a river; clearing where creatures, whose every habit is an open book to Ommony, lie basking, playing with their young; and a look-out rock from which, if the bears aren’t there before you, you may view the leagues of jungle spread like a sunlit sea.
Charley was in his element, and Ommony no less.
“My God, you know,” said Charley, “you can do this stuff early and late, when the raw’s left out and the real thing’s looking at you! They say you can’t, but you can! I know you can!”
“Let’s try,” said Ommony.
So they slept at noon, and stalked the mysteries of twilight, when two-thirds of the earth is waking and a third shades into the unknown.
“Any fool can shoot a tiger on the hop!” swore Charley. “Can you shoot him so he’ll show on the negative how the light ripples off his pelt? I’ll bet you!”
“All bets off,” said Ommony. “I think you can.”
But they needed the junglis to show exactly where the tiger lay, and Ommony’s low whistle to make the beast look up in such way that his proper aspect faced the lens, while Diana the staghound lay growling in rumbled undertones. And once it was Ommony’s rifle that changed death’s course, when a leopard rushed the click of the ambushed camera and Charley hugged his one tool, turning his back to protect it better.
“So that’s all right,” said Ommony, measuring the two strides and a half that death had lacked.
“Hope so, at any rate,” Charley answered. “I think I got him before he moved. Half a second, while I slip in another plate. Did you notice the brown of that shadow, and how his ‘hind-end seemed afloat in it? If that shows on the negative it’s worth the trip to India.”
“How much will you get for it?”
“No more than for a punk one. You can’t make money at this game.”
“Nor at mine. But it’s good, isn’t it?”
“You bet-yer!”
They seemed to have been friends a year when Jeff turned up, walking from the station because he loved the feel of brown earth underfoot — Jeff with a beard like Ommony’s and a boy’s grin, but bigger and heavier than Ommony and Charley both together. The verandah chair creaked under him, but not even the terrier was afraid, and Diana’s long tail thumped approval on the floor. Jeff’s grin set all the servants grinning. They passed and repassed on imaginary errands, to admire his hugeness and the depth of his bass voice, that is India’s measure of a man’s heart.
“Strange wanted me along,” he said, “so I came to discover if that’s convenient. A telegram wouldn’t have told you what you want to know—”
“You mean what you want to know, don’t you?” said Ommony, chuckling.
Jeff laughed aloud.
“You’re right. Charley wrote such a glowing account of you that Strange is suspicious. You know, a multi-millionaire is a poor devil who thinks everyone is trying to work him for something. Thirty per cent of what he thinks is true. Strange can’t escape even in India. There’s a lady on his heels. He wants to abuse your hospitality until Venus sets, and he’d like to be sure in advance that you won’t work him for anything.”
“What will you tell him?” asked Ommony.
“Shall I send for my tent from the station, or have you a spare bed?” Jeff answered.
So Jeff’s big tent was pitched, and two of the dogs adopted it forthwith, while Jeff’s one servant cleaned his boots alongside in the sun and bragged to Ommony’s assembled household about Jeff’s prowess.
“As a horse he is, yet stronger! Lo, with his fist, thus, he slew a man! They say the skull was broken like an egg-shell, but that I saw not. I have seen him lift a boat with two men in it. When the wrestlers from Tirhoot came to Delhi he threw them all, one by one, and he not weary at the end. They say that once, when men of evil purpose locked him behind doors, he broke down a door with nothing but his hands, and smote them with the pieces of it. Yet he laughs, and his heart is, as a woman’s, but not as a too inquisitive woman’s. The dastari is good.”
So they were now three who trod the jungle lanes, and laughed until rocks that had known the laughter of four forgotten races re-echoed to the high, the middle, and the bass — until the junglis brought word of a bear, hurt fighting, whom the flies were driving mad, and Jeff strode off to end that misery. (For Ommony is a prince of hosts, reserving to himself no more than right to judge emergency.) The bearskin lay pegged out raw side upward in the sun the morning Strange came, and Charley told him how Jeff had to use four bullets and the butt. Jeff’s leg was bandaged; it was nothing serious, but he did not walk to the station.
“I hope you didn’t shoot all the game before I got here,” Strange growled, when he met Jeff on the verandah. “Hurt again? You’re always in trouble!”
He was suffering from bachelor’s spleen, and as fearful for his tracks as a hunted animal.
“I think I’ve given a miss in baulk,” he said, sitting down at the breakfast-table next to Ommony. “It’s in the papers that I’m on my way home. Met your sister — splendid woman. It was she who first suggested my visiting you. What’s Charley doing here? Shooting game too?”
“Visiting me,” said Ommony, meeting no man’s eye.
“I meant that you and I and Ramsden—” Strange began.
“I’ve invited Charley too,” said Ommony.
“He has his living to get.”
“Charley has lived more and better in these last few days than in all his previous life,” said Ommony. “You’re entirely welcome here, Strange; but so’s he.”
“Hurrumm!” Strange nearly exploded, then governed himself. “Where did you get these eggs? They’re the best I’ve had in India.”
So Ommony talked poultry for a while, and of the business of keeping leopards from the henhouse, which calls for ingenuity.
“Why don’t you shoot’ em all?” Strange asked him.
“I shoot nothing in the jungle as long as it behaves.”
“D’you call stealing chickens behaviour?”
“It’s natural to leopards.”
“Then you mean we’re to shoot nothing but beasts that have broken through the hen-wire?” Strange asked disgustedly.
“You’ll find criminals in the jungle in the same proportions as among humans,” Ommony answered.
“How do you tell ’em?”
Strange had decided Ommony was crazy, and made a perfectly obvious effort to humour him. You could almost hear the mental mechanism click as he decided to cut his visit short.
“They’re just like other criminals. They tell you,” answered Ommony.
Strange sat there looking like Ulysses Grant — without the m
odesty. His was the only face at table that was legible. He resembled the bear that Jeff killed, hurt and driven nearly crazy by the flies of public criticism, and the servants were afraid of him, hardly daring to hand him things to eat. Jeff and Charley, having experienced his moods, were careful to say nothing, so the brunt of it fell on their host, who was at a loss for the present how to manage the situation. Silence fell, as if the fun of recent days had dried up and blown away along a bitter wind.
“I came to kill a tiger,” Strange said suddenly.
“I believe you did. I think you shall,” said Ommony.
“Now I wonder what the devil you mean by that remark?” Strange asked him.
One thing was obvious. Strange had looked up Ommony in the Gazette and so believed him to be quite a minor personage. He spoke rather as a man might to his game keeper — a man who deserved neither game nor keeper, but had both. It was in his mind that no man drawing such small salary in middle age was of much account, or had much right to dispense the forest privileges. Feudalism, an ancient gas that ever crept along with money, and deluded men, caused him to regard his host as someone who had scant option in the matter. He didn’t enjoy being kowtowed to, but expected it, and his new great business organization had made him more tyrannous than ever.
Breakfast, that should have struck the key-note for holiday and comradeship, came to an end on B-flat, and Jeff Ramsden tried to corner Strange alone; for Jeff fears nothing except his own slow-wittedness, which he strangely overestimates.
“Look here,” he began; but Ommony interrupted him, sent him and Charley on imaginary business of looking for a leopard’s spoor across the vegetable garden, and took Strange off alone to introduce him to the wilderness.
They took rifles and walked to the look-out rock — two miles down a fire-lane rutted by the wheels of loaded carts.
Strange’s mood backed and veered without improving. He may have been wondering why a man with an income in the millions should have to hide himself in a forest. From hat to shoe-soles, rifles and all, the same two-hundred-dollar bill would have purchased the entire kit, down to the skin, of either himself or Ommony. It annoyed him that Ommony strode beside him like the owner of the place.