He felt sure of it.

In the silence and the blackness--in the tense, steamy atmosphere of expectancy--he felt perfectly at ease, although he knew, too, that there was superstition to be reckoned with--and that is something which a white man finds hard to weigh and cope with, as a rule.
The sweat ran down his face in little streams a the prickly heat began to move across his skin, like a fiery-footed centiped beneath his undershirt, but he noticed, neither.

He began to be unconscious anything except the knowledge that the bones of his grandsire lay underneath him and that Mahommed Gunga waited for the word that would fit into the scheme and solve a problem.
"Are there any tigers here now ?" he asked presently, in a perfectly normal voice.

He spoke as he had done when his servant asked him which suit he would wear.
"Ha, sahib! Many." "Man-eaters, by any chance ?" Mahommed Gunga and the other man exchanged quick glances, but Cunningham did not look up.

He did not see the quick-flashed whites as their eyes met and looked down again.
"There is one, sahib--so say the kansamah and the head man--a full-grown tiger, in his prime." "I will shoot him." Four words, said quietly--not "Do you think," or "I would like to," or "Perhaps." They were perfectly definite and without a trace of excitement; yet this man had never seen a tiger.
"Very good, sahib." That, too, was spoken in a level voice, but Mahommed Gunga's eyes and the other man's met once again above his head.
"We will stay here four days; by the third day there will be time enough to have brought an elephant and--" "I will go on foot," said Cunningham, quite quietly.