The whole jungle world rocked and trembled from the violence of the
report.

When the villagers, aroused by the roar of the rifle and led by Khusru
and Puran and Little Shikara's father, rushed down with their
firebrands to the ford, their first thought was that they had come
only to the presence of the dead. Three human beings lay very still
beside the stream, and fifty feet in the shadows something else, that
obviously was _not_ a human being, lay very still, too. But they were
not to have any such horror story to tell their wives. Only one of the
three by the ford, Singhai, the gun-bearer, was even really
unconscious; Little Shikara, the rifle still held lovingly in his
arms, had gone into a half-faint from fear and nervous exhaustion, and
Warwick Sahib had merely closed his eyes to the darting light of the
firebrands. The only death that had occurred was that of Nahara the
tigress--and she had a neat hole bored completely through her neck. To
all evidence, she had never stirred after Little Shikara's bullet had
gone home.

After much confusion and shouting and falling over one another, and
gazing at Little Shikara as if he were some new kind of a ghost, the
villagers got a stretcher each for Singhai and the Protector of the
Poor. And when they got them well loaded into them, and Little Shikara
had quite come to himself and was standing with some bewilderment in a
circle of staring townspeople, a clear, commanding voice ordered that
they all be silent. Warwick Sahib was going to make what was the
nearest approach to a speech that he had made since various of his
friends had decoyed him to a dinner in London some years before.