The Heart Of Little Shikara
By EDISON MARSHALL
From Everybody's
If it hadn't been for a purple moon that came peering up above the dark jungle just at
nightfall, it would have been impossible to tell that Little Shikara was at his watch. He
was really just the colour of the shadows--a rather pleasant brown--he was very little
indeed, and besides, he was standing very, very still. If he was trembling at all, from
anticipation and excitement, it was no more than Nahar the tiger trembles as he crouches
in ambush. But the moon did show him--peering down through the leaf-clusters of the
heavy vines--and shone very softly in his wide-open dark eyes.
And it was a purple moon--no other colour that man could name. It looked almost unreal,
like a paper moon painted very badly by a clumsy stage-hand. The jungle-moon quite
often has that peculiar purplish tint, most travellers know, but few of them indeed ever try
to tell what causes it. This particular moon probed down here and there between the tall
bamboos, transformed the jungle--just now waking--into a mystery and a fairyland,
glinted on a hard-packed elephant trail that wound away into the thickets, and always
came back to shine on the coal-black Oriental eyes of the little boy beside the village
gate. It showed him standing very straight and just as tall as his small stature would
permit, and looked oddly silvery and strange on his long, dark hair. Little Shikara, son of
Khoda Dunnoo, was waiting for the return of a certain idol and demigod who was even
now riding home in his howdah from the tiger hunt.
Other of the villagers would be down to meet Warwick Sahib as soon as they heard the
shouts of his beaters--but Little Shikara had been waiting almost an hour. Likely, if they
had known about it, they would have commented on his badness, because he was
notoriously bad, if indeed--as the villagers told each other--he was not actually cursed
with evil spirits.
In the first place, he was almost valueless as a herder of buffalo. Three times, when he
had been sent with the other boys to watch the herds in their wallows, he had left his post
and crept away into the fringe of jungle on what was unquestionably some mission of
witchcraft. For small naked brown boys, as a rule, do not go alone and unarmed into the
thick bamboos. Too many things can happen to prevent them ever coming out again; too
many brown silent ribbons crawl in the grass, or too many yellow, striped creatures, no
less lithe, lurk in the thickets. But the strangest thing of all--and the surest sign of
witchcraft--was that he had always come safely out again, yet with never any satisfactory
explanations as to why he had gone. He had always looked some way very joyful and
tremulous--and perhaps even pale if from the nature of things a brown boy ever can look
