O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 by Various

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At first, deep down in his heart, he had really not intended to go all
the way. He had expected to steal clear to the outer edge of the
firelight; and then stand listening to the darkness for such
impressions as the jungle would choose to give him. But there had been
no threshold, no interlude of preparation. The jungle in all its
mystery had folded about him at once.

He trotted softly down the elephant trail, a dim, fleet shadow that
even the keen eyes of Nahara could scarcely have seen. At first he was
too happy to be afraid. He was always happy when the jungle closed
round him. Besides, if Nahara had killed, she would be full-fed by now
and not to be feared. Little Shikara hastened on, trembling all over
with a joyous sort of excitement.

If a single bird had flapped its wings in the branches, if one little
rodent had stirred in the underbrush, Little Shikara would likely have
turned back. But the jungle-gods, knowing their son, stilled all the
forest voices. He crept on, still looking now and again over his
shoulder to see the village fire. It still made a bright yellow
triangle in the dusk behind him. He didn't stop to think that he was
doing a thing most grown natives and many white men would not have
dared to do--to follow a jungle trail unarmed at night. If he had
stopped to think at all he simply would have been unable to go on. He
was only following his instincts, voices that such forces as maturity
and grown-up intelligence and self-consciousness obscure in older
men--and the terror of the jungle could not touch him. He went
straight to do what service he could for the white sahib that was one
of his lesser gods.

Time after time he halted, but always he pushed on a few more feet.
Now he was over halfway to the ford, clear to the forks in the trail.
And then he turned about with a little gasp of fear.

The light from the village had gone out. The thick foliage of the
jungle had come between.

He was really frightened now. It wasn't that he was afraid he couldn't
get back. The trail was broad and hard and quite gray in the
moonlight. But those far-off beams of light had been a solace to his
spirit, a reminder that he had not yet broken all ties with the
village. He halted, intending to turn back.

Then a thrill began at his scalp and went clear to his bare toes.
Faint through the jungle silences he heard Warwick Sahib calling to
his faithless beaters. The voice had an unmistakable quality of
distress.

Certain of the villagers--a very few of them--said afterward that
Little Shikara continued on because he was afraid to go back. They
said that he looked upon the Heaven-born sahib as a source of all
power, in whose protection no harm could befall him, and he sped
toward him because the distance was shorter than back to the haven of
fire at the village. But those who could look deeper into Little
Shikara's soul knew different. In some degree at least he hastened on
down that jungle trail of peril because he knew that his idol was in
distress, and by laws that went deep he knew he must go to his aid.

V

The first few minutes after Warwick had heard a living step in the
thickets he spent in trying to reload his rifle. He carried other
cartridges in the right-hand trousers pocket, but after a few minutes
of futile effort it became perfectly evident that he was not able to
reach them. His right arm was useless, and the fingers of his left,
lacerated by the mugger's bite, refused to take hold.

He had, however, three of the five shells the rifle held still in his
gun. The single question that remained was whether or not they would
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
rifle; but by the luck of the gods he might achieve it. He wanted to
find Singhai's knife and hold it compressed in his palm.

It wasn't that he had any vain hopes of repelling the tiger's attack
with a single knife-blade that would be practically impossible for his
mutilated hand to hold. Nahara had five or so knife-blades in every
paw and a whole set of them in her mouth. She could stand on four legs
and fight, and Warwick could not lift himself on one elbow and yet
wield the blade. But there were other things to be done with blades,
even held loosely in the palm, at a time like this.

He knew rather too much of the way of tigers. They do not always kill
swiftly. It is the tiger way to tease, long moments, with half-bared
talons; to let the prey crawl away a few feet for the rapture of
leaping at it again; to fondle with an exquisite cruelty for moments
that seem endless to its prey. A knife, on the other hand, kills
quickly. Warwick much preferred the latter death.

And even as he called, again and again, he began to feel about in the
grass with his lacerated hand for the hilt of the knife. Nahara was
steadily stealing toward him through the shadows.

The great tigress was at the height of her hunting madness. The
earlier adventure of the evening when she had missed her stroke, the
stir and tumult of the beaters in the wood, her many days of hunger,
had all combined to intensify her passion. And finally there had come
the knowledge, in subtle ways, that two of her own kind of game were
lying wounded and helpless beside the ford.

But even the royal tiger never forgets some small measure of its
caution. She did not charge at once. The game looked so easy that it
was in some way suggestive of a trap. She crept forward, a few feet at
a time. The wild blood began to leap through the great veins. The hair
went stiff on the neck muscles.

But Warwick shouted; and the sound for an instant appalled her. She
lurked in the shadows. And then, as she made a false step, Warwick
heard her for the first time.

Again she crept forward, to pause when Warwick raised his voice the
second time. The man knew enough to call at intervals rather than
continuously. A long, continued outcry would very likely stretch the
tiger's nerves to a breaking point and hurl her into a frenzy that
would probably result in a death-dealing charge. Every few seconds he
called again. In the intervals between the tiger crept forward. Her
excitement grew upon her. She crouched lower. Her sinewy tail had
whipped softly at first; now it was lashing almost to her sides. And
finally it began to have a slight vertical movement that Warwick,
fortunately for his spirit, could not see.

Then the little light that the moon poured down was suddenly reflected
in Nahara's eyes. All at once they burned out of the dusk; two
blue-green circles of fire fifty feet distant in the darkness. At that
Warwick gasped--for the first time. In another moment the great cat
would be in range--and he had not yet found the knife. Nothing
remained to believe but that it was lost in the mud of the ford, fifty
feet distant, and that the last dread avenue of escape was cut off.

But at that instant the gasp gave way to a whispered oath of wonder.
Some living creature was running lightly down the trail toward
him--soft, light feet that came with amazing swiftness. For once in
his life Warwick did not know where he stood. For once he was the
chief figure of a situation he did not entirely understand. He tried
to probe into the darkness with his tired eyes.

"Here I am!" he called. The tiger, starting to creep forward once
more, halted at the voice. A small straight figure sped like an arrow
out of the thickets and halted at his side.

It was such an astounding appearance as for an instant completely
paralyzes the mental faculties. Warwick's first emotion was simply a
great and hopeless astonishment. Long inured to the mystery of the
jungle, he thought he had passed the point where any earthly happening
could actually bewilder him. But in spite of it, in spite of the
fire-eyed peril in the darkness, he was quite himself when he spoke.
The voice that came out of the silence was wholly steady--a kindly,
almost amused voice of one who knows life as it is and who has
mastered his own destiny.

"Who in the world?" he asked in the vernacular.

"It is I--Little Shikara," a tremulous voice answered. Except for the
tremor he could not keep from his tone, he spoke as one man to
another.

Warwick knew at once that Little Shikara was not yet aware of the
presence of the tiger fifty feet distant in the shadows. But he knew
nothing else. The whole situation was beyond his ken.

But his instincts were manly and true. "Then run speedily, little
one," he whispered, "back to the village. There is danger here in the
dark."

Little Shikara tried to speak, and he swallowed painfully. A lump had
come in his throat that at first would not let him talk. "Nay,
Protector of the Poor!" he answered. "I--I came alone. And I--I am thy
servant."

Warwick's heart bounded. Not since his youth had left him to a gray
world had his strong heart leaped in just this way before. "Merciful
God!" he whispered in English. "Has a child come to save me?" Then he
whipped again into the vernacular and spoke swiftly; for no further
seconds were to be wasted. "Little Shikara, have you ever fired a
gun?"

"No, Sahib--"

"Then lift it up and rest it across my body. Thou knowest how it is
held--"

Little Shikara didn't know exactly, but he rested the gun on Warwick's
body; and he had seen enough target practice to crook his finger about
the trigger. And together, the strangest pair of huntsmen that the
Indian stars ever looked down upon, they waited.

"It is Nahara," Warwick explained softly. For he had decided to be
frank with Little Shikara, trusting all to the courage of a child. "It
all depends on thee. Pull back the hammer with thy thumb."

Little Shikara obeyed. He drew it back until it clicked and did not,
as Warwick had feared, let it slip through his fingers back against
the breach. "Yes, Sahib," he whispered breathlessly. His little brave
heart seemed about to explode in his breast. But it was the test, and
he knew he must not waver in the sahib's eyes.

"It is Nahara, and thou art a man," Warwick said again. "And now thou
must wait until thou seest her eyes."

So they strained into the darkness; and in an instant more they saw
again the two circles of greenish, smouldering fire. They were quite
near now--Nahara was almost in leaping range.

"Thou wilt look through the little hole at the rear and then along the
barrel," Warwick ordered swiftly, "and thou must see the two eyes
along the little notch in front."

"I see, Sahib--and between the eyes," came the same breathless
whisper. The little brown body held quite still. Warwick could not
even feel it trembling against his own. For the moment, by virtue of
some strange prank of Shiv, the jungle-gods were giving their own
strength to this little brown son of theirs beside the ford.

"Thou wilt not jerk or move?"

"Nay, Sahib." And he spoke true. The world might break to pieces or
blink out, but he would not throw off his aim by any terror motions.
They could see the tiger's outline now--the lithe, low-hung body, the
tail that twitched up and down.

"Then pull the trigger," Warwick whispered.

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.

The words that he said, the short vernacular words that have a way of
coming straight to the point, established Little Shikara as a legend
through all that corner of British India. It was Little Shikara who
had come alone through the jungle, said he; it was Little Shikara's
shining eyes that had gazed along the barrel, and it was his own brown
finger that had pulled the trigger. Thus, said Warwick, he would get
the bounty that the British Government offered--British rupees that to
a child's eyes would be past counting. Thus in time, with Warwick's
influence, his would be a great voice through all of India. For small
as he was, and not yet grown, he was of the true breed.

After the shouting was done, Warwick turned to Little Shikara to see
how he thought upon all these things. "Thou shalt have training for
the army, little one, where thy good nerve will be of use, and thou
shalt be a native officer, along with the sons of princes. I, myself,
will see to it, for I do not hold my life so cheap that I will forget
the thing that thou hast done to-night."

And he meant what he said. The villagers stood still when they saw his
earnest face. "And what, little hawk, wilt thou have more?" he asked.

Little Shikara trembled and raised his eyes. "Only sometimes to ride
with thee, in thy _howdah_, as thy servant, when thou again seekest
the tiger."

The whole circle laughed at this. They were just human, after all.
Their firebrands were held high, and gleamed on Little Shikara's dusky
face, and made a lustre in his dark eyes. The circle, roaring with
laughter, did not hear the sahib's reply, but they did see him nod his
head.

"I would not dare go without thee now," Warwick told him.

And thus Little Shikara's dreams came true--to be known through many
villages as a hunter of tigers, and a brave follower and comrade of
the forest trails. And thus he came into his own--in those far-off
glades of Burma, in the jungles of the Manipur.

THE MAN WHO CURSED THE LILIES

By CHARLES TENNEY JACKSON

From _Short Stories_

Tedge looked from the pilot-house at the sweating deckhand who stood
on the stubby bow of the _Marie Louise_ heaving vainly on the pole
thrust into the barrier of crushed water hyacinths across the channel.

Crump, the engineer, shot a sullen look at the master ere he turned
back to the crude oil motor whose mad pounding rattled the old bayou
stern-wheeler from keel to hogchains.

"She's full ahead now!" grunted Crump. And then, with a covert glance
at the single passenger sitting on the fore-deck cattle pens, the
engineman repeated his warning, "Yeh'll lose the cows, Tedge, if you
keep on fightin' the flowers. They're bad f'r feed and water--they
can't stand another day o' sun!"

Tedge knew it. But he continued to shake his hairy fist at the
deckhand and roar his anathemas upon the flower-choked bayou. He knew
his crew was grinning evilly, for they remembered Bill Tedge's
year-long feud with the lilies. Crump had bluntly told the skipper he
was a fool for trying to push up this little-frequented bayou from
Cote Blanche Bay to the higher land of the west Louisiana coast, where
he had planned to unload his cattle.

Tedge had bought the cargo himself near Beaumont from a beggared
ranchman whose stock had to go on the market because, for seven
months, there had been no rain in eastern Texas, and the short-grass
range was gone.

Tedge knew where there was feed for the starving animals, and the
_Marie Louise_ was coming back light. By the Intercoastal Canal and
the shallow string of bays along the Texas-Louisiana line, the bayou
boat could crawl safely back to the grassy swamp lands that fringe the
sugar plantations of Bayou Teche. Tedge had bought his living cargo so
ridiculously cheap that if half of them stood the journey he would
profit. And they would cost him nothing for winter ranging up in the
swamp lands. In the spring he would round up what steers had lived and
sell them, grass-fat, in New Orleans. He'd land them there with his
flap-paddle bayou boat, too, for the _Marie Louise_ ranged up and down
the Inter-coastal Canal and the uncharted swamp lakes and bays
adjoining, trading and thieving and serving the skipper's obscure
ends.

Only now, when he turned up Cote Blanche Bay, some hundred miles west
of the Mississippi passes, to make the last twenty miles of swamp
channel to his landing, he faced his old problem. Summer long the
water hyacinths were a pest to navigation on the coastal bayous, but
this June they were worse than Tedge had ever seen. He knew the
reason: the mighty Mississippi was at high flood, and as always then,
a third of its yellow waters were sweeping down the Atchafalaya River
on a "short cut" to the Mexican Gulf. And somewhere above, on its west
bank, the Atchafalaya levees had broken and the flood waters were all
through the coastal swamp channels.

Tedge grimly knew what it meant. He'd have to go farther inland to
find his free range, but now, worst of all, the floating gardens of
the coast swamps were coming out of the numberless channels on the
_crevasse_ water.

He expected to fight them as he had done for twenty years with his
dirty bayou boat. He'd fight and curse and struggle through the _les
flotantes_, and denounce the Federal Government, because it did not
destroy the lilies in the obscure bayous where he traded, as it did on
Bayou Teche and Terrebonne, with its pump-boats which sprayed the
hyacinths with a mixture of oil and soda until the tops shrivelled and
the trailing roots then dragged the flowers to the bottom.

"Yeh'll not see open water till the river cleans the swamps of
lilies," growled Crump. "I never seen the beat of 'em! The high
water's liftin' 'em from ponds where they never been touched by a
boat's wheel and they're out in the channels now. If yeh make the
plantations yeh'll have to keep eastard and then up the Atchafalaya
and buck the main flood water, Tedge!"

Tedge knew that, too. But he suddenly broke into curses upon his
engineer, his boat, the sea and sky and man. But mostly the lilies. He
could see a mile up the bayou between cypress-grown banks, and not a
foot of water showed. A solid field of green, waxy leaves and upright
purple spikes, jammed tight and moving. That was what made the master
rage. They were moving--a flower glacier slipping imperceptibly to the
gulf bays. They were moving slowly but inexorably, and his dirty
cattle boat, frantically driving into the blockade, was moving
backward--stern first!

He hated them with the implacable fury of a man whose fists had lorded
his world. A water hyacinth--what was it? He could stamp one to a
smear on his deck, but a river of them no man could fight. He swore
the lilies had ruined his whisky-running years ago to the Atchafalaya
lumber camps; they blocked Grand River when he went to log-towing;
they had cost him thousands of dollars for repairs and lost time in
his swamp ventures.

Bareheaded under the semi-tropic sun, he glowered at the lily-drift.
Then he snarled at Crump to reverse the motor. Tedge would retreat
again!

"I'll drive the boat clean around Southwest Pass to get shut of 'em!
No feed, huh, for these cows! They'll feed sharks, they will! Huh, Mr.
Cowman, the blisterin' lilies cost me five hundred dollars already!"

The lone passenger smoked idly and watched the gaunt cattle
staggering, penned in the flat, dead heat of the foredeck. Tedge
cursed him, too, under his breath. Milt Rogers had asked to make the
coast run from Beaumont on Tedge's boat. Tedge remembered what Rogers
said--he was going to see a girl who lived up Bayou Boeuf above
Tedge's destination. Tedge remembered that girl--a Cajan girl whom he
once heard singing in the floating gardens while Tedge was battling
and cursing to pass the blockade.

He hated her for loving the lilies, and the man for loving her. He
burst out again with his volcanic fury at the green and purple horde.

"They're a fine sight to see," mused the other, "after a man's eyes
been burned out ridin' the dry range; no rain in nine months up
there--nothin' green or pretty in----"

"Pretty!" Tedge seemed to menace with his little shifty eyes. "I wish
all them lilies had one neck and I could twist it! Jest one head, and
me stompin' it! Yeh!--and all the damned flowers in the world with it!
Yeh! And me watchin' 'em die!"

The man from the dry lands smoked idly under the awning. His serenity
evoked all the savagery of Tedge's feud with the lilies. Pretty! A man
who dealt with cows seeing beauty in anything! Well, the girl did
it--that swamp angel this Rogers was going to visit. That Aurelie
Frenet who sang in the flower-starred river--that was it! Tedge
glowered on the Texan--he hated him, too, because this loveliness gave
him peace, while the master of the _Marie Louise_ must fume about his
wheelhouse, a perspiring madman.

It took an hour for the _Marie_ even to retreat and find steerage-way
easterly off across a shallow lake, mirroring the marsh shores in the
sunset. Across it the bayou boat wheezed and thumped drearily,
drowning the bellowing of the dying steers. Once the deckhand stirred
and pointed.

"Lilies, Cap'n--pourin' from all the swamps, and dead ahead there
now!"

Scowling, Tedge held to the starboard. Yes, there they were--a phalanx
of flowers in the dusk. He broke into wild curses at them, his boat,
the staggering cattle.

"I'll drive to the open gulf to get rid of 'em! Outside, to sea! Yeh!
Stranger, yeh'll see salt water, and lilies drownin' in it! I'll show
yeh 'em dead and dried on the sands like dead men's dried bones!
Yeh'll see yer pretty flowers a-dyin'!"

The lone cowman ignored the sneer. "You better get the animals to feed
and water. Another mornin' of heat and crowdin'--"

"Let 'em rot! Yer pretty flowers done it--pretty flowers--spit o'
hell! I knowed 'em--I fought 'em--I'll fight 'em to the death of 'em!"

His little red-rimmed eyes hardly veiled his contempt for Milt Rogers.
A cowman, sailing this dusky purple bay to see a girl! A girl who sang
in the lily drift--a-sailing on this dirty, reeking bumboat, with
cattle dying jammed in the pens! Suddenly Tedge realized a vast
malevolent pleasure--he couldn't hope to gain from his perishing
cargo; and he began to gloat at the agony spread below his wheelhouse
window, and the cattleman's futile pity for them.

"They'll rot on Point Au Fer! We'll heave the stink of them, dead and
alive, to the sharks of Au Fer Pass! Drownin' cows in dyin' lilies--"

And the small craft of his brain suddenly awakened coolly above his
heat. Why, yes! Why hadn't he thought of it? He swung the stubby nose
of the _Marie_ more easterly in the hot, windless dusk. After a while
the black deckhand looked questioningly up at the master.

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