be of use to him.

The rifle lay half under him, its stock protruding from beneath his
body. With the elbow of his left arm he was able to work it out.
Considering the difficulties under which he worked, he made amazingly
few false motions; and yet he worked with swiftness. Warwick was a man
who had been schooled and trained by many dangers; he had learned to
face them with open eyes and steady hands, to judge with unclouded
thought the exact percentage of his chances. He knew now that he must
work swiftly. The shape in the shadow was not going to wait all night.

But at that moment the hope of preserving his life that he had clung
to until now broke like a bubble in the sunlight. He could not lift
the gun to swing and aim it at a shape in the darkness. With his
mutilated hands he could not cock the strong-springed hammer. And if
he could do both these things with his fumbling, bleeding, lacerated
fingers, his right hand could not be made to pull the trigger. Warwick
Sahib knew at last just where he stood. Yet if human sight could have
penetrated that dusk, it would have beheld no change of expression in
the lean face.

An English gentleman lay at the frontier of death. But that occasioned
neither fawning nor a loss of his rigid self-control.

Two things remained, however, that he might do. One was to call and
continue to call, as long as life lasted in his body. He knew
perfectly that more than once in the history of India a tiger had been
kept at a distance, at least for a short period of time, by shouts
alone. In that interlude, perhaps help might come from the village.
The second thing was almost as impossible as raising and firing the