Argosy, Vol. 1 (1882) — page 370: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE CHERRY PARASOL. BY OWEN HACKETT. The story of a tiger hunt which was unconventional in the sense that the tiger anticipated his cue ana appeared on the scene without waiting for the beaters to rout him out. HAT scart You see only the end of it. Fortunately by wearing a high collar I can just conceal it; but it extends from the neck (close by the jug- ular vein, too, my boy!) down over the shoulder quite to the breastbone. A tiger did that—a royal Bengal— and a beauty he was, I tell you! You can see the skin any day in my married sister's sitting. room. But it’s a story quite worth telling and it has a funny side, too, that was thought quite worth repetition at the time in the English papers, though they did not get at the inside facts of the adventure. It was the period of the hot season stagnation when we were in the consu- lar service at Madras, you know. The English society (including the few Americans there) were doing little else than sleep and yawn to pass the time. But everybody, the men especially, were galvanized into excitement when the news came that a tiger had carried off first a woman and then a child dur- ing the previous week from a station about fifteen miles in the interior, at the foot of the mountains. Time was when this would have been a sort of every day announcement in India; but of late years these monsters have been killed off except far in the interior wildernesses, and it had already become a rare event for one of these royal fellows to issue from his jungle kingdom. At any rate, things have got to such a pass of menta: torpidity that we need- ed only the slightest straw to grasp at for the sake of excitement. In half an hour a hunt had been agreed upon and servants were flying everywhere about the town to arrange the details and secure the accessories, such as teams and wagons, native por- ters and beaters; and in the cool of the evening fifteen or twenty gentlemen sportsmen were engaged in oiling gun locks, swabbing out rifle barrels and preparing generally for the morrow ’s expedition. It was just dawn on the following morning when we started—a curious cavalcade of fifty or more, in which the white faces were largely in the minor- ity. Some were on horseback, some in carts drawn by bullocks, which in that country were very different from what are known as such at home. Here they use the small and slender gray zebu with its curious hump, and known to the menageries of the west as the “ sacred bull of India” and said to be regarded with veneration in the east. There is little to tell of that hunting expedition. We arrived at the station or plantation and found that not only was the descent of the tiger true, but that since then he had maimed and al! but carried off an able bodied cooly, who had been rescued only in the very nick of time. We therefore spread our besters out in a circle covering a wide bit of the neighboring jungle, while our party distributed itself in a line that formed the chord of this arc, towards which the native beaters were gradually con- verging. There was no result, however, in the way of tigers, during’ the two davs in ecomilcooolks CO