Part 44

But the little ratel met that regal stare squarely and unmoved. He whose proud boast it was that he feared nothing that walked or crawled, or swam or flew, could not be frightened now. And he who came to terrify was perhaps all but ten feet long, and he whom he sought to terrify was barely three feet. It was a comparison to make you gasp.

Now, that lion did not want the ratel at all, or his wife, or his family, or anything that was his. He wanted the gnu, and would be very pleased if the ratel would go away and leave it to him.

The ratel, moreover, did not want the gnu, being an eater of honey, locusts, and generally badger-like fare for the most part; and if the lion had only had the sense to wait a few minutes longer behind the scenes, the ratel would have gone away and left the gnu. But he would not be driven; that was the rub. Attacking nobody unprovoked, he was a grim beast to attack, and gave way before none. Hence the trouble.

Finding that the bluff of the impressive tableau did not work, the lion tried a fresh one. Still staring at the ratel, he sank his head to the ground, so that his great mane hung to the earth all about him. His forelegs and his shoulders crouched, but his hindlegs and his back were held at their highest, and his tail began to lash behind. Then he began to growl tremendously and nerve-shatteringly, and as he did so he curled his upper lips up and back, till the whole ghastly array of his teeth was laid bare to view. In this position he looked like a gigantic grinning mask, with blind eye-sockets where the wrinkles were on the sloping forehead, his eyes nearly invisible below, and a tail lashing far up atop. It was a horrible sight, and one calculated to stampede the pluckiest animal.

It was, of course, also a deliberate piece of mesmeric bluff, the reason for which was not made clear till one noticed, what the ratel probably could not, that the great leonine tusks, the terrible fangs, were yellow and worn, as were the rest of the teeth. This was an old lion, a king on a throne already tottering, a monarch of yesterday.

That lion, however, might have turned into Satan himself, for all the ratel cared. He was threatened, attacked, bullied, forced. His blood was up, and had not all who ever fought him allowed that he was the pluckiest beast on earth? Enough! Come lion! come devil! he would give ground to none.

Lions are not too patient. Also, they have fine spirit of their own. They are among the very few beasts who will hunt and attack animals as strong as, or stronger than, themselves. And this lion's patience snapped suddenly. All at once he seemed to remember that he was still a king, though a king already within the shadow of abdication. The terrible bass rumble of his growl grew, and changed tone; his tail lashed faster and faster; and then, all suddenly heralded by a couple of wicked, rasping, coughing grunts, he--charged.

The ratel moved to meet him--to meet him--and at a cool jog-trot!

What happened then was hard to follow. It looked as if the worn fangs of the lion failed to make his hold on the wonderful, leathern, loose armor of the little honey-badger, and that he bungled the stroke of his terrible paw. Be that as it may, the honey-badger certainly went straight in, right under the lion's guard, right under the lion, and rearing, he bit home, and hung like a living spanner.

And here, perhaps, it is best to draw a curtain. For one reason, I cannot describe it, and frankly confess the fact. For several other reasons, it is best not to try. The ratel died in about ten minutes, crushed, battered, smashed to death; but the chaos lasted longer than that, because, even after death, he was not done with--the passing of life had locked his amazing jaws shut forever, and they were shut on the lion.

The end found the little ratel lying crumpled up and crimson on the trampled grass, and the lion running about like some great injured dog, squatting down every few seconds to lick furiously at his wound. Fear was in the eyes of the king of beasts, for the first, probably, and certainly for the last, time in his life, and his blood reddened the grass wherever he made his way; but the internal hemorrhage was the worst.

Then the vultures came, and that, my friends, is a signal for us humans to go. The vultures get the last word always, even in a story, and the name of that word is--FINIS.

XVIII

THE DAY

Now, if you wore a helmet and neck armor of purple, green, and blue in metallic reflections, with scarlet cheek and eye pieces, if your uniform were of purple, brown, yellow, orange-red, green, and black, "either positive or reflected," with a long, rakish, dashing rapier-scabbard cocked jauntily out behind, wouldn't you feel proud? So did he; pride and the "grand air" were written all over him. True, though, the rapier-scabbard was not a rapier-scabbard exactly--only a tail; but it looked like one, in a way. His full title was Phasianus colchicus, but ordinary people called him just plain pheasant for short.

You would have thought, after all this, that even in the first pale light of a cold dawn he would have been easy to see. As a matter of fact, Gaiters, the head gamekeeper, one of his underlings, three dogs, and a gun passed right under his bed without seeing him. Rather, they may have unconsciously seen him, and put him down as a bundle of dead twigs and leaves caught up in a branch. This is not very complimentary, perhaps, to a gentleman attired in a gorgeous uniform as heretofore set out, but true; and lucky for him, too, to have at once a uniform of unquestioned splendor and one which would melt into its surroundings.

They, the men, did not see him; but he, the old cock-pheasant, saw them right enough. He opened one eye, and stared at them through that. Then he opened the other eye, and stared at them through that. Neither stare seemed to please him.

It was not Gaiters's way to march through the wood at that hour in the morning. What meant this unseemly disturbance of Phasianus's domain? His suspicions, never long at rest, woke up. Moreover, somewhere at the back of his brain rose a memory, a little, tiny speck of a memory, which grew.

Then he stood right up.

Everywhere, here and there, in the gray cloak of the dawn-mist, he could hear the sharp "Chawk-chawk!" and the quick, flustered whir as pheasant after pheasant came down from its roosting-perch to clean and breakfast. But his suspicions held him for a few minutes longer, stretching his neck and peering about at the still-shrouded mystery of the ground below; and it was as well, perhaps.

Suddenly his head was still; a spray of a brier-bush was swaying gently. There was nothing in that, of course, if there had been any breath of wind to move it; but there wasn't. Wherefore our gallant friend did not come down to preen and breakfast like the rest, but sat motionless as a statue, while the sun rose and touched him to a winking golden and bronze wonder, and the mists began to be torn asunder. He wanted to know what moved that brier-branch, and he wasn't taking chances till he did.

Day came on apace, and all the night hunters who had remained so late had already hurried off to bed save one. He appeared, evidently empty, certainly very angry indeed at having waited for a cock-pheasant who refused to do what he was supposed to do and come down to breakfast. Out of the brier-bush he came, a lean dog-fox, snarling horribly up at the pheasant, who calmly returned the gaze, conscious of his safety, of course, and said "Chuck it!" in a loud, harsh voice, and quite distinctly, twice.

The fox, knowing it was no good to wait any longer in the daylight, went, like a floating red shadow. The pheasant watched him go, but did not move for some time. Foxes had been known to come back again more suddenly than they went.

At last he flew to the earth, but even then he did so as silently as his noisy wings would let him; and he did not announce the fact with a half-crow, as the others had done. Very circumspectly he slipped off through the undergrowth, by a series of little crouching runs, stopping every now and then to freeze and listen.

Soon he came to one of those open, beautiful, grass-covered "rides" with which keepers intersect pheasant-coverts. He stopped dead on the edge of it, himself invisible among the drooping, leaning, old-gold bracken. The "ride" was full of wood-people, for here had been scattered that corn which Gaiters intended the pheasants to feed upon. Indeed, there were about ten pheasants, hens and young cocks of the year, doing exactly what they were intended to do. Also, there were some half-dozen softly-tinged, blue-gray wood-pigeons, and one cheeky jay--whose wing-patches rivaled the perfection of the blue sky above--doing their best in a quiet sort of way to help the pheasants, which they were not intended to do, by any manner of means.

The old cock-pheasant slid across the "ride" after a bit, low as a crouching rat. He had no business there this day. His mind was still alert with suspicion. Moreover, his father had been a cunning old cock who had managed, by ways that were dark, to keep out of the game-bag for years, too. The taint, as Gaiters would have called it, had been passed on to him.

He made for the open edge of the covert, and he was mighty careful about doing that even. He felt that air and plenty of horizon were necessary to his well-being, after the disturbing vision of Gaiters and Co., so unnaturally busy, hurrying through the dawn.

Now, it is quite remarkable how much you can see from the edge of a pheasant-covert without being seen yourself. Keepers know that, but do not give the fact away. The ground sloped away in two open grass fields, a hedge dividing them, and it was within about the longitude and the latitude of where that hedge met the covert that our old friend maneuvered.