“Well, you see, what was a fellow to do,” returned the major suspiciously. “The fellow wouldn’t come out! and, by Jove, I wasn’t the only one that wanted him out! Besides, I didn’t creep in. I only looked in to see whether he was really there. That I could tell by his shining eyes.”

“But is not a man-eating tiger a horrifying beast? Once he takes to that kind of diet, don’t you know—they say he likes nothing else half so well. Good beef and mutton will no longer serve him, so I’ve been told at the club.”

“It is true he does not care for other food after once getting a passion for the more delicate, but it does not increase either his courage or his fierceness. The fact is, it ruins his moral nature. He does not get many Englishmen to eat, and it seems as if the flesh of women and children and poor cowardly natives undermines his natural courage. He is well known as a sneak. I sometimes can’t help thinking the ruffian knows he is a rebel against the law of his Maker, and a traitor to his natural master. The man-eating tiger and rogue-elephant are the devils of their kind. The others leave you alone except you attack them—then they show fight. These attack you—but run when you go out after them. You can never get any sport out of him. If there’s a creature on earth I hate, it’s a coward!” concluded the major.

“But why should you hate a coward so?” asked Hester, feeling at the moment, with the vision of the man-eating tiger in her mind, that she must herself come under the category. “How can a poor creature made without courage help being one?”

“Such as you mean, I wouldn’t call cowards,” returned the major. “Nobody thinks worse of the hare or the fox for running away from the hounds. Even men whose business it is to fight will run from the enemy when they have no chance, and when it would do no good to stand and be cut down. There is a time to run and a time to fight. But the man will run like a man, and the coward like a coward.”

Vavasor’s only reply was to himself, but he took care not to allow the slightest expression cross his face which the major might detect.

“What can harmless creatures do but run?” resumed the major, filling his glass with old port. “But when the wretch that has done all the hurt he could will not show fight for it, but turns tail the moment danger appears, I call him a contemptible coward. That’s what made me go into the place to find the brute.”

“But he might have killed you, though he was a coward,” said Hester, “when you did not leave him room to run.”