Hours passed by, the cries being raised at intervals.
"It is enough to give one the jumps, Richards; each time she yells I nearly fall off my branch." "Keep on listening, then it won't startle you." "A fellow can't keep on listening," Wilson grumbled; "I listen each time until my ears begin to sing, and I feel stupid and sleepy, and then she goes off again like a steam whistle; that child will be black and blue all over in the morning." A warning hiss from the shikari again induced Wilson to silence.
"I don't believe the brute is coming," he whispered, an hour later.

"If it wasn't for this bough being so hard I should drop off to sleep; my eyes ache with staring at those bushes." As he spoke the shikari touched him on the shoulder and pointed.
"Tiger," he whispered; and then did the same to Richards.

Grasping their rifles, they gazed in the direction in which he pointed, but could for some time make out nothing.

Then they saw a dim gray mass in front of the bushes, directly on the opposite side of the open space; then from the cage, lying almost in a direct line between it and them, rose the cry of the child.

They were neither of them at all certain that the object at which they were gazing was the tiger.