Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/186

 to the other, sucking at the blood of each of his vic- tims, after the manner of a mongoose. At last he reached the body of Che' Seman; and Minah, seeing him draw near, made a feeble effort to evade him. He pounced upon her like a flash, and then, under the eyes of the horrified Mat, an appalling scene was enacted. The tiger played with and tortured the girl, precisely as we have all seen a cat treat a maimed mouse. Again and again Minah crawled laboriously away, only to be drawn back by her tormentor when he seemed at last to have exhausted his interest in her. At times she lay still in a paralysis of inertia, only to be goaded into agonized motion once more by a touch of the tiger's claws. Yet, so cunningly did he manipulate his victim, that as Mat after- ward described it-"a time sufficient to enable a pot of rice to be cooked" elapsed ere the girl was finally put out of her misery.

Even then, He of the Hairy Face did not quit the scene of slaughter. Mat, lying prone upon the shelf, watched him through the long hours of that night of terror, playing with the mangled corpses of each of his victims in turn. Ile leaped from one to the other, apparently trying to cheat himself into the belief that they still lived, inflicting upon them a series of fresh wounds with teeth and claws. The moonlight, pouring through the torn thatch, revealed him frol- icking among the dead with all the airy, light- hearted agility and grace of a kitten playing with its own shadow on a sunny lawn; and it was not until the dawn was beginning to break that he tore down