And so they came up the little hill behind the dining-tent.

The great tusker moved evenly along, bearing on the pad an enormous yellow carcass, at which the little _mahout_ glanced occasionally over his shoulder.

Astride of the dead king sat the ryot, who had directed Isaacs, crooning a strange psalm of victory in his outlandish northern dialect, and occasionally clapping his hands over his head with an expression of the most intense satisfaction I have ever seen on a human face.

The little band came to the middle of the camp where the other tigers, now cut up and skinned elsewhere, had been deposited the night before, and as the elephant knelt down, the shikarries pulled the whole load over, pad, tiger, ryot and all, the latter skipping nimbly aside.

There he lay, the great beast that had taken so many lives.