TOLD BY THE DOCTOR 71 



him ' Colonel ' in public, it was with relief that we reverted, 

 when we could, to the name by which we had known him 

 for many a year and the relief was mutual. 



"Colonel!" he would say. "D your colonels! 



Have I been your * sawbones ' all these years to have that 

 flung at my head in my old age ? " this to such of us as 

 were the more intimate of his friends. 



After a pull at the long glasses we leant back, and the 

 worthy old medico began. 



" It was in the seventies, I must tell you, that the 

 experience I am about to relate befell ; and it was not very 

 far from here." The old boy named a district that had 

 borne a great name for tigers. 



" I was out on my usual hot-weather shoot, and arrived 

 one day at a village near which I had been informed there 

 was a solitary tiger of great age and enormous size that 

 had frequented those jungles for a great many years. He 

 had been fired at and hit by both sahibs and Kolis the 

 shikaris of those parts and bore a reputation for unfailing 

 cunning. He was also a 'very bad tiger/ and had killed 

 his three or four men. His latest performance in this line 

 had taken place not long before my advent, when he had 

 strolled out of the jungle in full daylight, and removed the 

 cranium of an old woman who was picking up mhowa 

 flowers under a tree. Not that he was in any way a man- 

 eater. His performances in the man-killing line were 

 reputed to be merely in revenge for the harm done him 

 by mankind he was lame of one leg, and carried a match- 

 lock ball in his back. 



" The jungle he frequented was quite impossible to beat, 

 if indeed one could ever have persuaded beaters to enter 

 it. The very sight of a buffalo tied up as a bait drove him 

 away for days. And he never approached a natural ' kill ' 

 or any waterhole without making a complete circle round 

 it and carefully examining all the adjacent trees. He 

 would stop all traffic along the jungle tracks in the neigh- 



