Free 13 Tiger Adventure by Willard Price Page B

shiver and shake with the cold no matter how hot the weather is. Then, all of a sudden, you are boiling and sweating and gasping for air. And if the attack is too severe, you die.’
    Roger thought for a moment that dying would be just the right thing for these three hoodlums. But he was ashamed of himself for thinking it, and said, ‘Can’t you get a doctor? Why do you have to bother about it?’
    There’s probably no doctor within a hundred miles. No, it’s up to me. We’ve got some things in our medicine chest that may help them.’
    ‘Well, what will I do all day?’
    ‘Feed the animals. Take care of them. You don’t need to worry about those crooks taking one of our animals away. They’re too sick to try any tricks today.’
    Hal picked up his bag of remedies, and left.
    Roger fed the animals - but that didn’t take long. He was a very active boy and wanted something to do. Why not take a little ride?
    He climbed into the truck, and set out. He didn’t expect to meet any wild beasts on the road. He enjoyed the fresh air, and the sounds that came from the forest. There was the
    chattering of a langur monkey. He heard a whistling sound. He guessed that it was the voice of the bird called the Whistling Schoolboy. Morning and evening, this bird pours out its song while in flight, whistling in a soft, sweet minor key a song that has no beginning and no end.
    He heard a peacock give its piercing call from the topmost branch of a giant tree. And he heard other birds that he had come to know - the drongos, golden orioles, and rosy pastors which drank the nectar of the samal flowers. Kingfishers went skimming over the river. A horned owl had settled for the day on a branch of the pipal tree overhanging the stream.
    The trees swarmed with fly-catchers, woodpeckers, bul-buls with red whiskers, and three kinds of sunbirds - red, purple, and green.
    What a paradise the Gir Forest was for all sorts of wildlife.
    He was a happy boy - but not so happy when his engine went dead halfway up a gentle slope.
    Roger thought he saw something strange out of the corner of his eye. He turned his eyes full upon it. What he saw made him perspire. A magnificent tiger was lying on a rock at the side of the road. Here the boy was sitting in an open truck that wouldn’t go. The tiger could reach him in two leaps.
    Roger shivered as if he had some of the ague that afflicted the three crooks. There was nothing to prevent the tiger from hopping into the truck and making a breakfast of the driver.
    But the tiger looked very sleepy. He gazed at the boy and the truck with half-closed eyes. He was evidently full of food and had no desire to make a meal of this fine boy.
    What had he eaten, and where was it? He had killed something, had eaten as much as he could hold, and left the rest for another meal later.
    What he had killed and partly eaten could not be far away. Roger quietly slipped out of the truck, walked up the slope, and then into the forest.
    He searched for two hours before he found it - the remains of a chital deer.
    Roger knew what he must do. He went back to his truck. The tiger had disappeared. This time the engine came to life and Roger turned about and headed for home.
    Hal was not there. He must be at the barn-house. Roger drove up there and walked in.
    Hal was tending his patients as they squirmed and wriggled, freezing cold one moment and boiling hot the next.
    ‘Come away for a minute,’ Roger said. ‘I want to tell you something. I’m going to get a tiger.’
    Hal laughed. ‘A hundred-and-thirty-pound boy is going to get a five-or six-hundred-pound tiger. That’s a good joke.’
    ‘No, I’m in earnest. I’ve seen the tiger and I’ve seen the ‘kill’ that he had been feeding on. It was a chital and there’s a lot of meat there still, Some time between now and morning the tiger will be coming back to eat more. I’m going to be there, and I’ll get him.’
    ‘If he doesn’t get you,’ Hal said,
    ‘He won’t