The Brahmin's Goat and the Four Rogues

Hearing of a gang of four clever rogues who repeatedly tricked honest travelers along the road to Vijayanagara, Tenali Raman disguised himself as an ordinary traveler and joined them for a stretch of the journey, curious to study their methods firsthand.

He watched them approach a simple Brahmin carrying a goat, each rogue in turn insisting the goat was actually a dog, planting doubt in the poor man's mind one repetition at a time until he abandoned the perfectly healthy goat in confused embarrassment, convinced his own eyes had betrayed him.

Rather than let them profit from the theft, Tenali Raman quietly gathered the abandoned goat himself and returned it to the Brahmin further down the road, explaining plainly what had truly happened. He then found the four rogues that evening and, without revealing his own identity, told them a tall tale about an even richer merchant waiting nearby — leading them straight into the hands of the local magistrate's men he had quietly alerted beforehand. The rogues who had built their trade on tricking honest fools were, in the end, undone by trusting a stranger's tale a little too easily themselves.