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O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 by Various
page 35 of 479 (07%)
keener-eyed than a lame tiger.

She knew enough not to confine herself to one village; and it is
rather hard to explain how any lower creature, that obviously cannot
reason, could have possessed this knowledge. Perhaps it was because
she had learned that a determined hunt, with many beaters and men on
elephants, invariably followed her killings. It was always well to
travel just as far as possible from the scene. She found out also
that, just as a doe is easier felled than a horned buck, certain of
this new kind of game were more easily taken than the others.
Sometimes children played at the door of their huts, and sometimes old
men were afflicted with such maladies that they could not flee at all.
All these things Nahara learned; and in learning them she caused a
certain civil office of the British Empire to put an exceedingly large
price on her head.

Gradually the fact dawned on her that unlike the deer and the buffalo,
this new game was more easily hunted in the daylight--particularly in
that tired-out, careless twilight hour when the herders and the
plantation hands came in from their work. At night the village folk
kept in their huts, and such wood-cutters and gipsies as slept without
wakened every hour to tend their fires. Nahara was deathly afraid of
fire. Night after night she would creep round and round a gipsy camp,
her eyes like two pale blue moons in the darkness, and would never
dare attack.

And because she was taking her living in a manner forbidden by the
laws of the jungle, the glory and beauty of her youth quickly departed
from her. There are no prisons for those that break the jungle laws,
no courts and no appointed officers, but because these are laws that
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