Ohe, little one. Art thou there? Well, I will tell thee, for thou hast
a cool head. They will dance, and it behooves thy father, who has
swept all the hills of all the elephants, to double-chain his pickets
to-night.
What talk is this? said Big Toomai. For forty years, father and son,
we have tended elephants, and we have never heard such moonshine about
dances.
Yes; but a plainsman who lives in a hut knows only the four walls
of his hut. Well, leave thy elephants unshackled tonight and see what
comes. As for their dancing, I have seen the place where--Bapree-bap!
How many windings has the Dihang River? Here is another ford, and we
must swim the calves. Stop still, you behind there.
And in this way, talking and wrangling and splashing through the rivers,
they made their first march to a sort of receiving camp for the new
elephants. But they lost their tempers long before they got there.
Then the elephants were chained by their hind legs to their big stumps
of pickets, and extra ropes were fitted to the new elephants, and the
fodder was piled before them, and the hill drivers went back to Petersen
Sahib through the afternoon light, telling the plains drivers to be
extra careful that night, and laughing when the plains drivers asked the
reason.
Little Toomai attended to Kala Nag s supper, and as evening fell,
wandered through the camp, unspeakably happy, in search of a tom-tom.
When an Indian child s heart is full, he does not run about and make a
noise in an irregular fashion. He sits down to a sort of revel all by
himself. And Little Toomai had been spoken to by Petersen Sahib! If he
had not found what he wanted, I believe he would have been ill. But the
sweetmeat seller in the camp lent him a little tom-tom--a drum beaten
with the flat of the hand--and he sat down, cross-legged, before Kala
Nag as the stars began to come out, the tom-tom in his lap, and he
thumped and he thumped and he thumped, and the more he thought of the
great honor that had been done to him, the more he thumped, all alone
among the elephant fodder. There was no tune and no words, but the
thumping made him happy.
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