did. At least, it may be addressed to one of the Elenas, or will tell me

if this be Anselmo.”

He looked at the envelope, which was addressed in a bold hand

—— J. G.

He had a horror of looking at a private letter, even when made public in a book or newspaper. “It’s a skunk’s trick,” he said, “but I do want to know where I am. I’ll apologise if I ever have the chance.” He pulled the enclosure from the envelope to read it. It proved not to be the letter (that had gone), but a piece of paper which had been sent with the letter. The paper was a half-sheet of coarse bluish notepaper on which the same hand had pencilled the words, “Si, Anselmo.”

“Now what on earth does that mean?” Hi asked himself. “Yes, Anselmo? I would give something to know what is happening in this place.” All was silent about him, save for that ticking of the clock.

With a little chirrupping cry, the black cat, which had been sleeping in the chair in the kitchen, came running along the passage. It was a slim, small-headed, short-coated cat, not yet of full growth; it rubbed against Hi’s legs and purred; Hi leaned down to stroke it, but watched the passage to the kitchen.

“That man has come in by way of the kitchen,” Hi thought. “He has scared the cat, or let in a draught upon him. I’ll be out of this.”

The office window seemed to be the exit most likely to bring him out beside his horse: he slipped into the office and closed the door behind him. Then he listened, with a beating heart, for some swift, stealthy footstep in the corridor or outside the window. “Perhaps,” he thought, “I shan’t hear any footsteps, only the brute’s hand on the latch. He’s a spy and a Red, that devil. Listen.”

In that silence, the beating of the clock clanged like the tolling of a bell. The cat, left to preen his fur in the hall, padded back towards the kitchen. Hi was on the point of turning to open the inner shutter of the window, when a little shrill whirring bell began to scream like an alarm-clock upon some metal hooks on a stand at the table end. The shock of the sound made his hair stand stiff upon his head. He saw the instrument shaking on its hooks with the vehemence of the bell. He had read and heard of these things, but had never before seen one. It rang for ten seconds, then paused, then rang for five seconds and paused again. Then it rang again with determination for half a minute on end, as though bent on having an answer. Someone was telephoning to that house of the dead.

His courage came back in a few seconds. Someone was telephoning: why should he not answer? Possibly an English voice would speak to him or someone who knew English. Even if there were a Red outside the door, he owed it to Carlotta to run the risk, if by running it he could learn where he was and where he should go next. He did not know how to take the call. He lifted the instrument from its hooks and listened, now at one end, now at the other, to silence. “The thing is stopped,” he said. “I don’t know how to work the beastly thing. Yes?” he called. “Yes? Who is there? What is it?”

No answer come to him, not even the murmur of other voices which sometimes comes over the telephone. Then suddenly the thought came to him that perhaps the wire had been cut, or the unseen speaker shot down somewhere far away. He put down the instrument, moved to the window and opened the shutter. As he pulled it aside, the bell tinkled a little, whimpered again, as though about to ring again, and then stopped. “The wires are cut,” he muttered, “that devil the spy has done it.”

Peering out of the window, he could see nothing but a darkness which gradually took shapes to itself of trees swaying in the wind, palms clicking and clacking, and stars which became brighter as he gazed. “Here goes,” Hi thought, “I cannot see that devil; I’ll risk it.” So he scrambled out, landed on his feet, and then stood for an instant lest someone should spring upon him. No one sprang; there was neither sight nor sound of anyone, only his horse nosing at the earth, and the wind shuffling and clicking. He unhitched his rein, mounted and cautiously rode forward.

At the space near the door he halted to listen and to try to see. No one was there.

“They’ll be where the spy was,” he thought, “crouched out of this cold wind. I’ll see and make sure.” He edged his horse a little and a little to the corner of the house, where he held him ready for a dash. Very cautiously he craned forward along his horse’s neck, till he could see round the corner. Then he stared with all his might at the space lit by the windows of the living-room. No horsemen were gathered there out of the wind, but at the lit window the figure of the spy still stood with his hand reached back for his gun and his brow pressed upon the pane. He was staring into the window: Hi could not see his face.

“Golly,” Hi thought, “he’s still there. He’s come here again.” He did not move a muscle for fully fifteen seconds; the spy did not move. Hi waited for that right hand to flash up suddenly with the gun, but it did not come.

Then Hi thought, “But what’s he up to? He saw me in the room five minutes ago; then probably he went after me in the kitchen. What brings him here again? What is he staring at there? Can there be another man in the room? He must know that I cleared out: he saw me do it. Is he waiting to plug me when I come back, or what?”

He waited for another fifteen seconds, but the man never stirred a muscle. He stood at the window, pressed to it, intently staring. Hi had seen cats and foxes waiting intently thus before springing; but the cats and foxes had at least trembled with the intensity of their control, this man was motionless.

“But who in the wide earth is he staring at?” Hi asked himself. “There must be someone in that room whom I never saw, but who was there when I was there.” Then he thought, “Whatever is in the room, there is something wrong with that man. He is not quite of this world.”

That was an opinion which the horse seemed to share, and the presence of it in the horse made Hi’s terror stronger. Yet the intentness of that watching figure “not quite of this world,” was fascinating. All purpose will arrest the purposeless, but this deadly purpose was absorbing. It made Hi forget that looking at a person will draw that person’s eyes towards the looker. For the moment, he did not care; he longed to see what the man saw. He stared: his horse also stared.

Suddenly a gust of the wind, now blowing at its height, caught the window by which Hi had escaped. Hi heard it crash to, with a tinkle of glass. The draught inside the house flung some door open, and blew ajar the unhasped casement by which the watcher stood. The result was something which Hi had not expected. The man slithered sideways, scraping along the wall, and collapsed, with his head towards Hi, and his gun arm twisted askew as no living arm could ever twist. The light, shining now from the unobstructed window pane, showed Hi the bullet-hole through which the body’s death had come.

The horse had swerved aside when the body fell. The knowledge that the man was dead, and had been dead from the first, came to Hi in a flash, at his first movement. The smell of powder in the room suddenly became significant. “That explains the big revolver shell,” he thought. “Oh, golly, let’s get out of this.”

The horse was out of sorts, but the cold had touched him up, and something of his rider’s terror was afflicting him. He swerved away from the house and galloped ahead across a peach plantation. Hi heard horses whinny and a man’s voice hailing him from behind him as he entered the plantation. The dreadful fear that it was the dead man mounted on the nightmare made him crouch on his horse’s neck and urge him forward. He heard shouts, calling to him to stop, or so it seemed.

At any other time, he might have stopped; but he could not now, after the corpse flopping down towards him. In a few moments, he was certain that men were shouting at him, several men, in earnest, shouting no Christian tongue. By this time he had crossed the plantation fence at a place where the bars were down, he was heading across a patch of savannah towards the forest. He heard horses coming after him. He called out that he was English and a friend. The man who was nearest to him, perhaps mistaking this for an insult, fired a shot in the direction of the voice, but missed. Hi crackled through some hard-leaved scrub into the darkness of the covert, leaving the direction to the horse. Many horses crackled into the scrub behind him. He called out again that he was English and a friend, but his bailers cursed him, called to him to stop and opened fire at him. As he rode, he heard the piping drone of birds; then, suddenly, some of the birds spat and hissed close to his ears, twigs fell from the trees about him; he knew suddenly that the birds were bullets.

The pursuers, with one exception, soon pulled up, the firing ceased, only one man still followed, calling to him to stop. Suddenly this one pursuer pulled up, and Hi at the same instant felt a coldness of fear all over him. There came a shot and shock, his horse swerved violently, staggered, recovered, and bolted into the forest. “He hit the horse,” Hi said, “but not badly, or he wouldn’t go like this.” For the rest of the ride his task was to keep on.

How long he rode the forest he never knew: the horse went on in his terror till he could go no more, then he halted, full of the ends of terror, nervy, starting at a shadow and trembling.

The moon was long since down. Hi could make out that he was in a kind of pan or crater in the forest, with wavy indistinctness everywhere, smelling of balm. He dismounted, tried to examine his horse, who would not let himself be examined, but had certainly been cut on the crupper. He tried to comfort the poor beast. Coming to a patch of grass near a brook, he offered him grazing and a drink, both of which he refused. “Poor old Bingo,” Hi said, “you’re dead beat, you shall rest.”

He tethered, unsaddled and spread his coat upon him. The beast stood where he was left without attempting to roll; he drooped his head as though he had come to the end.

“Now I am pretty nearly done,” Hi thought. “I don’t know where I am. I’ve been gone four days. I’ve killed one horse and cooked a second. Now I’m lost in the forest again.”

He listened for some noise of men or the creatures of men, but heard nothing save the noises of the forest. Terrors began to take hold of him, the dread of such a terror as had come the night before, the terror of the man at the window. Yet at last sleep took him from the terror of being awake: he fell into a pit of sleep and slept for hours.

During this, the fourth day of Hi’s journey, young Chacon the notary, reached Don Manuel with all the terrible news still to be told. By this time, men and horses had begun to arrive at the rendezvous. Some copies of the blasphemous proclamation, which had arrived in the west from Port Matoche, had roused intense feeling throughout the west: men answered Don Manuel’s call from all over San Jacinto. While Hi was lying down to sleep, Don Manuel, with an advanced guard of about a hundred men, pushed eastward from the river to begin his march.

XIV

Hi woke up suddenly into terror, for the forest was filled with a crying as of creatures gone mad. A pack of things was giving tongue with voices madder than a fox’s bark.

“Wild dogs gone mad,” he thought. The noise of the yap seemed to strike between the skull and the coats of the brain, as the idea of the weasel strikes into the brain of the rabbit. Hi jumped to the horse, who was already trembling. He cast loose the tethering rope and swung himself on to the beast’s bare back, gripping the headstall, and in an instant the horse was away with him, in a panic which Rosas himself could not have controlled. Horse and man fled like the bird knocked from roost in the night. What did the bags and the saddle matter while that crying filled the darkness?

“Oh, golly, what are those things?” he thought. “Oh, golly, if they are after us.” All the night seemed full of flaming eyes, but these were only fireflies, not a pack: the crying seemed to die away. The horse floundered through mud in a cane-brake, which crashed under his trampling. Hi dug his head into the horse’s neck and shut his eyes: it was like running the gauntlet for what seemed a long time. After it, he went through tall grass, which drenched him with dew. Hi felt him weakening beneath him as he came out of the grass: then suddenly water appeared before him as a lake or broad river, where the wind roused reflections of stars. Hi saw a fish leap and splash, shaking up a glittering; in an instant the horse was swimming, with the gleams all round him.

Hi knew that a very little thing would drown the horse in his present condition; he slipped off his back, slid sideways, caught his tail and swam with him. After about fifty yards, the horse put his feet down, stumbled on to his knees, but recovered and came to the bank. Hi with some trouble scrambled up in front of him, got a purchase on the reins, and helped him on to dry land. They stood there gasping together for a while, being both out of breath as well as very cold.

“O Lord,” Hi thought, “what on earth were those things? I’ve never heard anything so awful. Thank God, we got away when we did. A very little more, and they would have been on us. I think I should go mad if they were coming after me. Listen.”

There was no sound of any pack in cry coming after them. They had come to a part of the wilderness which was silent, save for the rustle of the reeds and the splash of the leaping fish. “I suppose it’s going to rain again,” Hi muttered with chattering teeth; “that is why the fish are leaping. I wish I’d brought my coat and the saddle.”

But they were left behind with the bags in a place which Hi was little likely to find again. “Lord, I do feel wretched,” he said, shivering. “I’ll get away from this water. There may be alligators in it. I never thought of them before. Come up, old Bingo; we’ll find a place for you.”

They moved away through a thicket into a space which had been burnt the year before. From the cold and from the colour of the sky, Hi judged that it was about an hour from the dawn. The horse stopped from exhaustion. “You’re sicker than I am,” Hi said. “I’ll do my best to warm you.”

He pulled grass: the horse would not touch it, but it served to rub him: he was trembling, his coat was staring, and his head was down. “I’d give something for a bucket of warm beer for him,” Hi said. “It’s hateful having nothing: even the bread is gone. Well, I must hope for the sun to come soon to warm him.”

The cold was so painful that he had to move away, to dance and flog his arms. The dawn seemed to take hours to bring any colour to the sky, yet it came at last.

“Thank God, here it comes at last,” he said. “If only I could hear a bell with it: even a cow-bell.”

It came with no sound of bells, but with a clapping of wings from all the near-by trees, as the multitudes of the birds awoke. Their cries were not sweet like the cries of so many English birds: only one seemed to have a sweetness in his voice. This was a biggish bird with black wings and orange breast. He had a sweet droning note which said, “Woe,” then, after an interval, “Woe” again. All the other birds seemed to be saying, “Damn it”: or so Hi thought.

As the light grew, the clamour of the birds rose to a roaring, for many of them, after trying their wings, took flight, wheeled, and sped away in their companies, to seek for food. Some of those who cried “Woe” settled on a tree which was covered with great white waxy flowers, intolerably sweet. Wafts of the sweetness came to Hi on the gusts of the wind. He saw them tear at the flowers and eat the petals. Hi, going to the tree, tasted a petal, thinking that what fed the birds could not harm himself. It was like sweetened church candle or much what he had imagined manna to have been. He ate of this manna with the knowledge that he, too, had been fed in the wilderness. When he returned to his horse, he found him stretched out dead.

It was the first time that he had lost a friend by death: he sat down beside him and wept. He was not a lad given to weeping: he had not wept for years, but he was shaken by the last four days, and in an extreme of loneliness, which made him know what a friend the horse had been in hours of danger and beastliness. Now that he was gone, Hi was alone indeed. The horse lay dead on his off side: his near crupper was scored with a bullet-mark. “So he was hit after all,” Hi said, “I thought he was. And the poor old Bingo saved me twice last night, and now he is dead.”

He remembered the last lines of a well-known song:

Could I think we’d meet again, It would lighten half my pain, At the place where the old horse died.

“Golly,” he thought, “I’ll never be unkind to a horse as long as I live, after this.”

After the stunned half hour, he picked himself up, to look round at where he was. He stood in a space of grass, ringed by trees, up which the creepers climbed in a fire of flowers. To his right were the reeds and the water, with the sun climbing above them; to his left was the dimness of the forest.

“I’m facing north,” he said. “Almost due north. I’m facing the plain as I stand. I’ve got about a day’s go in me. I must get to the plain this day, or I shall never get to it at all.”

The thought of Carlotta depending on him and Rosa thinking that he was on his way to fetch help came back in force. Again and again he went over in his mind the events which had delayed him. “It is just as if I were walking on a road which moves away from where I want to get to,” he said. “If I were to try to avoid Anselmo, I might get there. I’ve been four days and a bit. Or is it five days and a bit? If I get there now, I may be too late.”

As he went on into the north, he began to hear voices which spoke in his ears, bidding him to do this or that. So many voices spoke, that he began to feel that he was attended by a flock of things like birds, which had human voices and flew invisibly beside him. The going lay over miles of dead reed and broken brush which had been laid in a tornado of the August before. The dead reed having been laid in its prime, had not decayed, but had hardened to something like bamboo: the young reed growing through the old had then matted it into a cloth too high to trample down and too tough to thrust through. Much of this reed grew (at that season) in some inches of water. At the end of two hours of it Hi came to a growth of trees which had been uprooted in a line. For three hundred yards the line stretched like a wall in a succession of the shields of black, intertangled roots standing upright over the hollows whence they had been plucked. It looked like a wall of black snakes barring his way. When he had scrambled up the wall, he saw beyond it the lake amid her reeds, cruised over by white hawks. The beauty of the water in that light, reflecting so much other beauty of forest, flower and bird, each like an angel, could not be told. To Hi, it did not come like beauty; but as a shock. It stretched away, seemingly for miles, right across his path, to left and to right. He could see the sun in heaven, in this clear space; this gave him his compass points. He had come fairly truly to the north: now the lake stretched half a mile breadth of water in front of him. There was neither ford nor boat.

“I must just edge along to the west,” he thought. “This must be the water that stopped me yesterday when I was further to the east.”

After letting his clothes dry in the sun, he turned westwards along the lake, not far from its shore, in a mood of anxiety tempered by hunger. After a couple of hours of going, a black bog, with seepings of oil in it which killed plants, turned him away from the lake: he had to turn to the south to get round it. When he had turned, he began to think that he never would get round it. It turned him more and more to the south, for more than an hour. When he sat down to rest, more than half way through the morning, he felt that he was perhaps further from Anselmo than he had ever been.

As usually happens in the first days of starvation, with young people, his hunger was checked by weariness and weakness from becoming tyrannous. While he rested, he saw a scuffling among birds in a sunlit path about a hundred yards away. Going thither, he found some thorny shrubs, which even at that early season were covered with yellow plums the size of sloes. Birds, butterflies and many other insects were gorging themselves with these plums; he, too gorged, thinking that no better plums had ever grown. Being schooled now to think of the next meal whenever he had food, he contrived a sort of basket or frail of the leaves of the spade-palm into which he packed a couple of pounds of plums, which he took with him.

He judged that the sun had southed when at last he was able to cross the bog and turn again to the north. The going proved to be much better beyond the swamp. He set out in good spirits, walked hard for half an hour to the west, but then was stopped by another southward trending of the lake: he had to trudge southward again.

It was after a couple of hours of this trudging, when he was most tired and dispirited at having met no living soul nor any sign of man, that he heard far off, somewhere to the south, a single rifle shot. He shouted, hoping that the shooter might reply: he had no reply to his hail, but the thought, that someone was there, who might help him in his need, and in no case could make him much worse than he was, made him turn in that direction, shouting at intervals as he went. Perhaps two minutes after he had set out towards the place of the shot, he judged that he smelt smoke. He had but one whiff of it and could not catch it again: he was, however, sure that it was woodsmoke. “There is some sort of a fire there,” he thought. “I shall find somebody.”

Half an hour later, while he was hallooing, in the certainty that he must be near where the shooter had been, he saw a footmark in some soft earth close to a red-heart. The red-heart had been split by age, wind or lightning: it was exuding a bright blue fungus from the split. This brought him to a halt with a start, for the footmark was his own. He had halted just beside that tree when the smell of the smoke had come to him. There could be no doubt of it; he had noticed tree and fungus too nicely to be mistaken. There was besides, the footmark, unmistakably his. He was too wise to have false hope about it: he had been walking in a circle: he was bushed.

“There it is,” he said, “I am bushed.”

As the words were spoken, there came into his mind the memory of Tencombe at teatime during the last summer holidays. There was his mother with the sun upon her hair and her alert, decisive way: there was old Bill standing near the mantelpiece, holding his tea-cup, while with one foot he rolled over the retriever pup. There at the table beside the rest of them was a little frail, pale-faced, red-bearded man, with a whispering voice, who had been bushed in East Africa.

His words came back into Hi’s mind. “If you lose your head when you’re bushed, you’re done.”

“I’ll bet that that is true,” Hi said. “If I lose my head, I shall be done.”

He sat still for some minutes, trying to keep control of himself by repeating the things in his favour. “I have had food to-day: and still have some plums: it isn’t raining: I can’t be far from a camp or at least a place where hunters come, because of that shot: whatever wrong tracks I’ve taken, I can’t be far from the edge of this forest: whatever happens I must not give up hope, because ‘hope brings healing.’ I shall get out of this mess if I believe I shall. I do believe I shall. I believe that if I climb one of these trees, I may be able to see out of this forest.”

The thought fell like light into his mind, that he might see out of the forest; but it was not easy to find a tree which would both yield a view and be possible to climb. After some search he came to one that seemed perfect. It had the look of a red-heart, but was so swathed with tough creeper, which gave good hand-and-foot hold, that the bark was almost hidden. Hi set himself to climb. He discovered, before he had gone far, that the creeper stalks were bristly, like ivy or nettle stalks at home, and that the climb was hard work. “I’m weaker than I was,” he thought. The dust, dead twigs and fragments of bark fell over his face and down his neck, but he persevered, even when he roused up a gang of black tree ants. He came out through the dimness of the roof into a sea of flowers of every colour in a blaze of light, beset by birds and butterflies. All that he could see was a sea of flowers, running up into crests of greenness, topped here and there by spikes, pinnacles and fountains of strange leaves. There seemed no end to it in any direction, nor any break, for even the water was hidden by the trees. It glittered and glowed: it hummed with life: it exulted with an ecstasy of life: it lived thus in the sun all day, and at night the moon and the stars gave it the shadow of a life and the peace which man never has. It was all marvellous, but it had nothing to do with man: men did not come there.

After he had clambered down, he turned away towards the west, taking sighting marks, from tree to tree, to stop any more going in a circle. His hands were tingling from the creeper bristles, as though he had been pulling nettles with them. His face was tingling in a somewhat different way. It smarted as it had smarted years before at school when somebody had kicked a wet Rugby football hard against his cheek. The smarting spread down his neck to his chest and along his backbone. He rubbed the smarting skin, but the rubbing did it no good: it made it slightly different and worse. In about an hour, he felt a puffiness about his eyes: his lips and fingers had a tight feeling. “I’m swelling,” he said. “I must have been on one of those poison trees. If this gets much worse, I shan’t be able to see: I shall be all puffed up.”

In another hour, his eyes had become so swollen that he could not see clearly; all his face had swollen till it no longer felt like flesh: it drummed within with a drumming which seemed to beat upon his brain. His hands were so puffed that he could not bend his fingers. When he came to a puddle in the wood, he peered down to look at himself in the water. He could not see all, but he made out a bladdery appearance which frightened him. “I’ve gone just like the bladders we used to suck to make elastic,” he thought. “If one of these blisters bursts, I shall be done.” He sat down, trying not to be frightened. “I’m going to be blind,” he thought. “It will probably pass off in a few hours, but I shall be blind while it lasts. I shall be blind to-night: all to-night and perhaps to-morrow: and I don’t know where I am, nor how I am to get out of here. I’ve been a pretty rotten messenger, so far. Oh, I wish that this beating in my brain would stop.”

It did not stop: it grew louder, with a rhythm which did not vary for an hour together: it beat like a heart-beat: after a while there was something almost pleasant in its recurrence. Then, suddenly, it changed to another rhythm, which was not like a heart-beat, but much more exciting. Hi was afraid to hope: he stood still, listening. “I know what it is,” he said at last, “it is a kind of a mine-stamp, or engine of some sort: not far away. There is probably a mine here. I’ve wandered into Meruel, where the mines are: this is one of them. And I am going towards it.”

Hope came back into him as soon as he was certain that the noise came from men. Even Reds would be better than the forest. He went on towards the beating noise, which presently died away so that he scarcely heard it. He went forward, praying that it might not cease. The light was fast going from the forest (from sunset, not from his blindness); he longed to be with his fellow men before the night set in. He shouted from time to time. Presently the multitudes of the homing birds drowned the beating with the noise of their wings.

When the wings were at last quiet, the noise of the beating reappeared above the lesser noises of night. It was beating now in a different rhythm, with a louder volume. “It is not an engine,” Hi said. “I know what it is now. It is one of these tom-toms or native drums, like the one at home, which father used to let us play. I was an ass not to recognise it before. It must be near at hand, too. I’ll shout again.”

No answer came to his shouting: the drummer, if it were a drummer, was intent upon his rhythm, which was taking his soul up great spirals of recurrence into the ellipses of escape: what were night, nature and a lost human being to him?

At last, amid much that was indistinct, Hi saw a light among the trees. A little fire was burning there, though often obscured by things moving in front of it. “It is a camp fire,” Hi thought. “And it must be an Indian camp, because white men would never permit this drumming.”

Some little fear was in his mind lest the Indians should be hostile. He had heard that the forest-Indians were sometimes made dangerous by white criminals who found refuge among them. Still, even cannibals would hesitate, he thought, before killing meat suffering from poisonweed. “I believe that they will give me a square deal,” he said. In bursts, amid the constant noise of the drumming, he heard the voices and the movements of the people of the poblacion.

He called several times more. Now he was heard, for the dogs of the camp began to bark.

In a few minutes he came into a compound, or cleared space surrounded on three sides by Indian huts of the kind familiar to him from his father’s tales. Fires were burning upon stones in all the huts: by their light he could make out men in white and things like white cloths inside the huts. Some little dogs were at the doors barking. There was a splashing noise not far away. Men were talking, women were crooning to their babies, the drummer went on drumming. Somebody was thudding at something: it sounded like the beating of a wad of wet linen with a mallet. Strange things like minute devils came out of the huts, mocked at him and sidled softly away: he could not imagine what they were. The linen-thudder began to intone a thudding song of a melancholy kind, such as a dog in despair or affected by the moon will sing. The air was full of the smell of food, burning gums and sweet oils.

“I am English. I am a friend,” Hi called. “Don’t shoot. I am English.” He called this several times before anyone paid any attention to him. Then an Indian man, dressed in white, came from one of the huts towards him. He was a chubby little smiling man, grey-haired, cheerful and kind. He spoke to Hi, in words of one syllable in a tongue which Hi had not heard. He stared at Hi’s face, raised his hands and said, “Mar, Mar,” which Hi took to be Indian for “You have a swollen face.” “Yes,” Hi answered, in English, “I have indeed: trés Mar.” The Indian surveyed Hi from head to foot, which seemed to convince him that Hi was pretty Mar over all.

A coarse voice, from one of the huts facing Hi, called out an order to the Indian, who ceased in his pantomime of sympathy as though he had been stung. He seemed to invite Hi forward to enter the hut from which the voice had called. Hi went forward, with the Indian at his side, towards the hut.

The hut, like the other huts of the poblacion, was, at a guess, thirty feet long by fifteen broad. The end, which faced Hi, was open to the night: at the sides the roofs came down almost to the ground, with a tiling of palm leaves stitched with bast. The end of the hut was lit by a fire arranged among stones, which Hi could not help noticing were hewn stones. Someone was moving about beyond the fire: he called to the Indian some order, that Hi was not to come any nearer till the Indian had reported. When this had been done, the guide led Hi into the hut.

Hi could see across the fire a biggish white man, dressed in a shirt and riding breeches, with a bandolier cartridge belt. This man at the moment was bent at the fire lighting a twig, with which he soon lit a clay lamp.

“There, that’s lit,” he said. “Now, let’s have a look at you?”

He held up the lamp and surveyed Hi with a strange expression, which Hi could not read. He was a strongly-made, rather tall, robust man, with yellowish dead coloured hair, like brass-work smeared with oil. He was clean-shaven, even in that wild place. His eyes were grey-blue in colour. His nose was small and straight save for a defiant tip. His mouth had about it a look of defiance, scorn, contempt and utter fearlessness. He was without doubt an Englishman of about twenty-five years of age who had at one time lived among people of refinement.

“So,” the man said. “And where the hell do you come from?” Hi told him his tale, that he was lost while making for Anselmo.

“Anselmo?” the man said. “Anselmo? I never heard of Anselmo. Where is that?”

“I don’t know,” Hi said. “In the plain: not twenty miles from Santa Barbara. Isn’t this near the plain?”

“This is the Melchior forest, chum,” the man said. “What the hell have you done to your face?”

“I got it poisoned by poison ivy.”

“That’s a proper new chum’s trick. You’ll be blind to-morrow. What do you propose to do?”

“Perhaps you could let me stay here till my eyes are better and then give me a guide to the plain.”

“I’ve got no guide.”

“Or put me on my way then. I can’t be far.”

“Did anyone tell you of me, or put you up to coming here?”

“No.”

“Did you come out alone into this forest?”

“Yes.”

“God.”

There was a pause at this point, while the man put down his lamp. Hi had become used to scurvy welcomes from the natives of Santa Barbara, but this man was a fellow-countryman with some traces of breeding in him. The man sat on the edge of his hammock, with his feet upon a low wooden stool. He swung himself to and fro while he seemed to consider.

“Got any oof?” he asked at last.

“None here. I have some in Santa Barbara.”

“And I suppose you’ve got some in the savings bank at home?”

“Yes.”

“God,” the man said. “My God, my Father, while I stray.”

“Very well,” Hi said. “If this is all the welcome you can give me, I can go on. I am sorry if I have intruded.”

“Have you got a pack of cards?” the man asked.

“No. I’ll wish you good-night,” Hi said.

“As you please about that.”

Hi turned away, flaming with rage and self-pity at being treated thus, in his misery, there in the wilderness, by this fellow-countryman. He did not know where he was to go, nor how, in that darkness and pain, but he was not going to stop with this fellow. He moved back into the space in front of the houses, with a sense of the comfort of them. Each house seemed full of sheltered and fed men and women, who had fire, rest for the night, and certainty for the morrow, as well as companionship. He had none of all these things: he was miles from any of them: he was beside full of sickness.

“Here, chum,” the man called, “where are you going?”

“Out of this.”

“I don’t want your carcase poisoning the bush, and putting the game off, which is what will happen if you try it,” the man said. He raised his voice suddenly with a call for his Indian, who appeared on the instant, without noise of any kind. He spoke rapidly to the Indian for a moment, giving him orders. “See,” the man said at last to Hi, “you can’t go with your eyes in that state. I’ve told Chug-chug here to put you into a hut by yourself. He’ll give you stuff for your blisters as well as some chow. Go along with him: he’ll look after you.”

“Thank you,” Hi said.

“You’d better go with him, hadn’t you?” the man asked.

“Right,” Hi said. The Indian motioned to him to follow him to one of the huts on the right of the enclosed space. When Hi had entered the hut, which was dark, the Indian disappeared, leaving him alone there. It was like the other huts, closed at the sides by the roofs coming down to the ground, and open to the air at the ends. Hi felt utterly alone there. The tom-tom was still beating and beating: all his blood seemed to have gone thin and bitter from the poison in his skin. In the next hut many people were talking together: some were singing. Then at the door of the hut the little tiny devils appeared again: they mocked at him and sidled softly away.

Presently the Indian reappeared with wood for a fire and some burning embers. With these, he made a fire upon a hearth of hewn stones: the fire burned up so as to light the place a little. Hi noticed a couple of tin travelling trunks, much battered with service, against one of the walls. The Indian motioned to Hi to sit in a white cotton hammock, with fringes of coloured bast, which had been slung from the posts. He sat as he was bid, with his feet upon a long footstool of some hard wood. The Indians brought him a mush or stew in a calabash, which he ate with thankfulness. It was hot and seasoned with peppers: it brought the essence of life right into his being. While he ate of this dish, an Indian examined his feet for jiggers. When he had finished his meal, the Indians smeared his face and hands with a soft wet mess, which (unknown to Hi) they had been chewing while he ate. It had a rancid smell to it, but it soothed the pain at once. An Indian brought him a cotton quilt for his hammock. Wrapping himself in this, he turned in for the night: full of anxiety for his friends, wild with disappointment at having failed them, sick in body, and “perplexed in the extreme.”

He could not sleep, all weary as he was, because of the discomforts of his body. He lay twisting in his hammock, while the tom-tom beat in the hut beside him, changing its rhythm once in the hour. No one seemed to want to sleep in that village. Men and women were moving about, talking, telling endless stories, or singing like melancholy dogs, for hours together. Sometimes he dozed away for a few minutes till the touch of the hammock upon his face or hands roused him again. Always, when he woke, the tom-tom was beating and someone was telling a story. Little dogs, with sharp noses, enormous pointed ears and mangy skins, came snapping into the hut from time to time, after beetles, it seemed. The sidelong devils did not come again: he thought of them often enough.

On this, the fifth day of his journey to fetch Don Manuel, the Whites of the Western Provinces mustered 437 men at San Jacinto. They moved out to Don Manuel’s advanced post beyond the river, having left word that the final rendezvous would be at San Pablo, only thirty miles from Santa Barbara city. They brought with them many spare horses: this was the only excellence in their force, their weapons being mainly machetes, revolvers, rook rifles and shot-guns of all sorts and bores with whatever cartridges they had. There was no hesitation in any of them at the thought of marching upon Santa Barbara. They were all religious men, who felt that their faith was threatened. The parish priest at San Luis, where Don Manuel was camped, blessed them at their setting out: certainly no man among them doubted that his going was in the service of God.

XV

Towards three in the morning Hi fell into a deeper sleep, from which he was roused by the cold: his fire was out and his quilt had slipped from him. In groping for it, he found that his head had so swollen that he could hardly see. The pain was gone, but he was puffed like a prize pig.

“O Lord,” he moaned, “I shan’t be able to see. I can’t see across this hut. I shan’t be able to reach Anselmo even to-day. Now I am bound to be too late, and Carlotta may be killed because of me.” He turned out of his hammock to prove himself: it was only too true, he was nearly blind: he could not hope to go on without a guide. “Horses,” he thought. “These people have no horses. My only hope is a river. I may be near some tributary of the San Jacinto. If I could take a canoe down that, or if some Indian would take me, I might even find Don Manuel during to-day. There must be rivers which run into the San Jacinto. If that fellow told the truth, if this is the Melchior forest, I must be near the San Jacinto, or its eastern tributaries. I must speak to that fellow and beg him to help me. After all, he is an Englishman, though he is as ross as a mule.”

As it was dark and cold, he turned back to his hammock to try for warmth and sleep. He slept a little, by starts, always broken by nightmares. The cold struck him from underneath: it got into all his bones. “Aha, you English boy,” voices said to him in his dreams. “Now you’ve come into our power you shall be searched. You’ve got the cramps, you’ve got the aches, you’ve got the forest fever, you are going to go blind; you’ve got the poison in your entrails and we’re going to wring you with it.”

When he next awoke it was daylight, though still early. The village had come again to the life it had hardly laid down during the darkness. The thudding noise, of wet linen being banged on stones with a mallet, had begun again: women were singing and little brown children were playing in the _patio_. The sharp-eared dogs had tucked their noses into their flanks for sleep in sunny places. The tiny devils were sidling about, mocking at people. He recognised them now as dove-grey parrots with rosy breasts. Their bright eyes and compact bent beaks gave them the knowing look of men about town: they looked like devilled-bone-and-biscuit men. They looked at him, with their heads cocked aside, considering his offers of friendship, and then sheered off from him as something not to be trusted.

He turned out of his hammock to peer from his puffy eyes at the new world about him. His body felt as though it did not belong to him: pains and aches had taken it over. His face and hands felt dead: his mouth was full of fur. He wandered out into the morning.

He could see well enough to take a track which led past the side of his hut to a river some twenty feet broad where naked men and women were sitting in the water immersed to their chins. Some women were pounding bunches of wet cotton on the stones near the river; their tiny children, tying minute fragments of stone to strips of bast, were making bolases with which they entangled the dragon-flies.

After washing in the river, and bathing his puffy eyes, Hi returned to the huts, hoping to see the white man, who was not in his hut. Early as it was, most of the men of the community had gone to whatever work they had to do. Women were pounding and straining cassava, or baking it into loaves. They laughed at Hi in a friendly way: one of them gave him bread and a gourd full of broth. While he ate this, sitting in a hammock, an Indian, dressed in three tobacco-tin lids, took station before him, grinned, pointed to his chest and said: “Me Johnny God-dam.” Unfortunately, this was all the English known to him. Hi tried by signs to find out where the white man was, where one would come out if one were to follow the river, and where the white settlements were. His performance roused great interest, but nobody understood it: he had the general impression that they thought that he was praying for dry weather.

He went back to the hut where he had passed the night; he was full of anxiety and helplessness. Chug-chug, if that were his name, appeared with some aromatic leaves, which he rubbed gently on Hi’s blistered skin, with a soothing effect. He was a cheerful man, who talked all the time. Hi questioned him in English and by signs: this increased Chug-chug’s flow of talk, without bringing any enlightenment.

“Oh, I ought to go on,” Hi said. “I ought to go on. Yet what is the sense of going on, blind as I am, when I don’t know where to make for? See here, Chug-chug,” he said, with signs to represent the white man, “when will the Señor, the chief, come back into the camp?” Chug-chug knew that an important question was asked, but he could not understand it; he made a speech about the new cassava patch, which Hi could not understand. Having thus made the honours even he disappeared.

“I’ll wait till mid-day,” Hi thought. “The white man will be back at mid-day. Father always said that the forest practice is to eat at mid-day and then take siesta. After siesta, I shall be able to go on. The man’s a regular rossy tick: yet even a rossy tick will tell a fellow the way. And the more I think of it, the more sure I am that I shall be able to reach the San Jacinto River from here. I may even reach Don Manuel to-night.”

He stood at the hut door for a few minutes gazing at the scene of primitive life before him. The sun, blazing down into the compound, put new life into him: he felt both warmed and comforted. He was beginning to see a little better out of both eyes, and found that he could now bend his fingers. One of the best of his symptoms was the feeling that if he were to lie down he would sleep.

He went into the hut, with a sudden curious sensation that somebody had been in the hut, behind him, until the instant of his turning to come in. “Strange,” he thought. “It is this puffiness of my eyes. Or I know what it was, coming into the gloom out of the glare, made me think that the posts were a man.” He turned back to make sure of this. “I suppose that that is what it must have been,” he thought. “It did look rather like a man.”

He sat in his hammock, trying to think how much he was to blame for going astray. Then his thoughts turned to the Englishman. “What is he and what is he doing here, and why is he so sour? He must be a prospector of sorts: he is not an engineer, for he hasn’t any engine. He won’t be only a hunter or explorer: he’s too much of a swine for that. I wouldn’t mind betting that he is a gold or mineral prospector, who has come on a good thing out here and is afraid of some other person cutting in on him. That is it, I’ll bet any money. That would explain his being so crusty and giving me so poor a welcome. I wonder what the man is. I suppose that those are his trunks, over there against the wall.”

The trunks were the usual, small, flat, tin, traveller’s trunks, made low, so as to fit under bunks at sea, or lie snugly along the side of a mule. They had once been japanned black. Hard service had worn away much of the japan: some of the tin shewed bright, the rest was battered and discoloured. On the top of the lid of one of them was the letter D in what had once been white paint: on the top of the lid of the other was most of the letter W. Both trunks had been neglected for some time. Sprays of creepers, which had thrust under the roof there, had grown right over them. “D and W,” Hi repeated. “A letter has been blotted out on both boxes. I suppose the man’s name is D . . . W . . . Dirty White, or Dingy Welcome, or Doubtful Wanderer: the initials might stand for any of them. They look like the sort of box a prospector would take. Meanwhile, I should be the better for some sleep.”

He turned into his hammock, hoping that a rest would help to heal his eyes; he saw the dog at the hut door nuzzle further into his flank; then his overwhelming weariness pressed down upon him so that he slept unheeding.

He woke some hours later with the feeling that someone was in the hut wanting to speak to him. It was not easy to thrust aside such folds of sleep; while he struggled with them, the someone, whoever he was, had gone; there was no one there when he awoke. “Strange,” he said. “It seemed as though someone were there. I thought that I saw someone, a tallish chap, who had something to say. I suppose I dreamed it. I wish that sleeping in this land didn’t give one this thick sort of brown taste in the mouth whenever one wakes.”

He turned out to stretch, feeling stunned and stupid, but the better for his rest. “I’ll see if the D. W. fellow has come back,” he thought.

He found that the village was taking the siesta; he had slept into the afternoon; the village was more silent than it had been at any hour of the night. He called at the door of the white man’s hut. “Are you there, sir? May I speak with you?” As he had no answer, he peeped in; the white man had not returned. “Still away,” Hi thought. “What a nuisance.”

He had the feeling that he must not enter the hut while the owner was away. None the less, he looked curiously at the contents of the hut. Some clothes of a yellowish drill were hanging from one of the posts, with a leather belt on which the initial D was marked in black. At the back of the hut, beyond the hammock, was a table, made of two planks supported upon the taller sort of Indian stools, of the kind cut by them for their god-houses. This table was heaped with objects, which seemed to be mostly stones or lumps of ore; he could not make out what they were. Under the table was another tin box marked D W upon the side; this box was open and contained boots. The hammock had a good brown camel-hair blanket rolled up across its foot. Hi had just such another in his kit at Santa Barbara: his mother had chosen it for him, “For your father says the nights can be very cold, even a month after the rains.”

There seemed to be nothing else worth notice in the hut, except the usual canvas water bottle, holding a gallon, a canvas bucket with a laniard spliced into its rim, and a canvas basin in which D. W. had soaped himself that morning. Hi had experience of the things bought for outfits; he noticed that all these things were very good of their kind but the worse for wear. “No tools,” Hi thought. “He has a working or a claim somewhere near; the tools will be there.”

“Well,” Hi said to himself, “I must not spy upon this man. I wish that he would come back, so that I could have it out with him.”

He walked into the compound, where he passed an hour trying to make friends with the parrots and the little dogs. Both were gentle yet suspicious; he had no success with them. The day dragged heavily over him, while he waited for D. W. to return. The village was interesting and the forest beautiful. He longed to be out of both, going fast upon his mission, while there was still hope.

After a while, he felt within himself the suggestion that there might be something of interest in the hut where he had slept. He had not examined it thoroughly; now that his eyes were so much less swollen, he felt that that would be something to do; there might even be some book tossed aside somewhere. He had seen no trace of a book in D. W.’s hut.

In the furthest corner of his hut was a small rubbish heap. He pulled a half-burnt piece of wood from his fireplace. With this, he began to poke aside the rubbish, to see what he could find. The rubbish was of all sorts, much the worse for having been in a corner of the hut into which the rain had blown. He found these things:

Part of a canvas sack, into which the ants had worked.

A briar pipe, much used, which had a bleached look from exposure.

Part of a leather strop that had been cut through.

Three small twists of tough galvanised wire.

Four bits of old bootlace.

A broken strap.

A screw eye.

A paper, containing a mouldy empty cardboard box for Marcham’s Patent Trouser Buttons, with the legend, “No more sewing.”

Most of a pair of drill riding breeks made in Taunton. The ants had been in these. Two envelopes, or parts of envelopes.

A sodden little fat book, rather like a newly-drowned puppy.

He brought this book into the light, so that he might examine it. It proved to be a dumpy volume of Milton’s poems, complete in itself, “printed 1828 for J. Smith, Bookseller, 193, High Holborn,” and bound in green cloth boards. It opened at the frontispiece, of Milton “from an Impression of a Seal,” opposite a vignette of Eve among some dahlias beside a very wriggly snake. On the flyleaf of the book was an inscription in faint ink in the handwriting of a woman:

To Dudley Wigmore, from his Mother. August 12th, 1881.

“Dudley Wigmore,” Hi said. “D. W. . . . So that is the fellow’s name, is it? It is an odd book for him to have. And he might have been a little more careful of a gift from his mother, one would think.”

The book was swollen and stuck together from being soaked; Hi opened it in the sun, with great care. He knew little, certainly, about Milton, except that he had written a poem called L’Allegro, which Hi had had to learn by heart some years before at his prep. school. “I daresay I’ll like it better now,” he said. “Anyhow this is a book, and a very famous book: there must be something in it. And it will be something to do to try to dry it without pulling out the leaves.”

After he had opened the book to dry, he went back to look at the rubbish heap for more treasures. He found nothing more in that heap, except some rags which the ants and grubs had riddled to pieces. He looked at the two bits of envelope, both of which bore English stamps. On one of the stamps part of the postmark could be made out when the paper was held to the light. Hi read the name “allet.” He tried to think of some English place with a name which ended in “allet”: he could think of none. “It sounds liker a French name,” he thought. One of the pieces had been addressed to

D. Wigm—— C/o Messrs. W—— Sant——

The rest was torn off. The other, which was smaller, had only a bit of the flap, the stamp, and the ends of an address, in a different hand, thus:

—— Esq., —— et Cie.

Hi dropped the bits of paper on to the heap. Some of the leaves of the Milton were now dry: he turned them, so that others might dry. Having nothing else to do, he brought out the stools from his hut, rested the book on one, sat on the other, and passed some hours, reading bits of the poem as the leaves dried. The Indians looked at him with curiosity and fear, thinking that he was practising magic. His mood and that place gave the poetry a value which it had not held (for Hi) in the prep. school. “When my eyes are better,” he thought, “I will read this all through. It is a wonderful thing.”

The day passed thus hour by hour with no sign of the white man. Some Indians who had come to the poblacion with cassava, brought out some stew for Hi with a piece of hot bread, which he ate. Having eaten, he brought the stools and the book into the hut where he had slept.

“It is strange,” Hi said. “Whenever I come into this hut I have the feeling that there is somebody here. It is the way that this hammock-post catches the light.”

The sun was now fast dropping behind Melchior, so that it lit up the end of the hut where the rubbish had been thrown. Something sparkled on the floor beyond the rubbish. Hi picked it up. It was a little gold locket clipped to a rusty steel watch-chain. After wiping the locket, he opened it, with some trouble. It contained a tiny photograph, not so big as his thumbnail, of a young woman’s face. She was a handsome young woman, of the hawk brunette type.

“I suppose that this is his girl,” Hi thought, closing the locket. “He must have dropped this somehow in the dark; he’ll be glad to have it again.”

He dropped the locket on to one of the wooden stools, so that he might have it at hand when D. W. returned; then he sat in his hammock, thinking of Carlotta. “Early to-morrow,” he thought. “Early to-morrow, whatever happens, I shall get away from here. Even now, with luck, I might not be too late. But I simply must not be too late. I must be in time.”

As the light suddenly passed from the world at the dropping of the sun behind Melchior, he wondered whether after all he would be in time. It was hard to say what might have happened under a madman like Don Lopez. Supposing that the worst had happened? Supposing that he were not in time?

He was weary from the hardships of the journey, all his body was crying out for rest. He edged himself into his hammock, for the comfort of lying prone, and there fell asleep. He slept heavily, having still some arrears to make up, and yet, for all its soundness, his sleep was troubled with the sense that all was not well. Gradually, as his sleep weakened, he began to feel that there was an unhappiness, or something worse, close to him: someone in distress was there. “Ah,” he answered in his sleep, “it is you, Carlotta. All right, I’ll do my best to warn him and bring him. I’ll do my best, though I do seem to have muddled things.” Then, as his sleep weakened still more, he knew that it was not Carlotta who was there, but a man who had been there before.

“Yes,” he said, in his sleep, “there was a man in the hut this afternoon: so he is here again; well, what can I do for him? Where are you? Let’s have a look at you.”

He struggled out of his sleep to a knowledge of the waking world, which came upon him slowly, as another world, that had taken its place, moved away in fiery mist. He saw, or thought that he saw, the man standing near the hut entrance, looking at him, with sad eyes. “All right,” Hi cried.

“Is it supper-time? I’ve been asleep, but I’m awake. I’ll be up in one moment.” As he blinked and sat up, the figure faded away into the darkness behind it, which was now a blackness of leaves moving against stars. “It was only a dream, after all,” Hi said. “But it is odd how there always seems to be a man here. I suppose one gets to imagine these things.”

He came back fully to the world of the village, where now lamps and fires were burning, women singing and the tom-tom drumming. “I’ll see if D. W. has come back,” he said.

He was prevented by the entrance of Chug-chug, who came to ask him by signs to come to the other hut. “D. W. is back, then,” he thought. “Now for it.”

He followed Chug-chug to the other hut, which was lit by three lamps. A trestle-table had been rigged up, food was set upon it. The man sat on his camp-chair at the table-head, facing Hi. He had a much worn cartridge belt slung over his shoulder: one of the pouches of it was stamped D. W. He had been cleaning a light sporting rifle with a pull-through and an oily feather: he now held the rifle across his knees, and kept opening the breech and snapping it to. Hi could see him more clearly than had been possible to him the night before. In the main, he felt his impression confirmed, that he did not like the man: there was more force in him than wisdom or goodness.

“You’d better have some chow, chum,” the man said.

The chow was the oily, peppery meat stew, served with cassava bread, of which Hi had already eaten twice that day.

“Find yourself a pew there,” the man said. He was not a gracious host: he seemed to resent Hi’s presence there, yet this was a kind of invitation from him to sit down and dine. Hi pulled a stool to the table and sat down.

“I suppose I’d better introduce myself,” the man said, “like the ladies do at these receptions. Did you ever hear of Brocket Letcombe-Bassett, the hundred yards Blue?”

“No,” Hi said.

“Well, he is my father’s second cousin. My father’s a clergyman, or was. I don’t know whether he’s still alive; I don’t much care.”

“Then are you Mr. Letcombe-Bassett?”

“Yes.”

“Then is there another Englishman here; a Mr. Wigmore?”

“Wigmore? Did you know him?” the man asked.

“No,” Hi said. “But I found a book of his and this little gold locket. Did you know him?”

“Yes, he was a prospector here,” the man said. “He died of forest fever here a couple of years ago.”

“Poor chap,” Hi said. It seemed a lonely death for a man with a mother and a lover.

“Yes,” the man said. “He died of forest fever a couple of years ago. There’s a lot of forest fever here as soon as the rains call off.”

“Were you with him when he died?” Hi asked.

“Not actually with him, no; but in at the death, yes. I was as near as I wanted to be. Forest fever’s an easily caught complaint.”

“Is he buried here?”

“Yes; or not far from here. I had the Indians to bury him. Indian fashion, in a hole in the hut.”

“In the hut where I am?”

“The hut where you are? No. In the hut in the bush where he kicked the bucket.”

“Were you able to let his people know that he was dead?” Hi asked.

“No; I didn’t know that he had any people.”

“Hadn’t he letters?” Hi asked. “There are scraps of letters in the hut; torn up. Perhaps we could piece them together.”

“There weren’t any letters,” the man said. “Wigmore had no letters. I expect you saw bits of some of mine, from my loving father: blast him.”

“No, these were to Wigmore.”

“Oh,” the man said. “Well, I saw none. I looked through his things. Of course, out here, an Englishman with another Englishman, that was the least one could do.”

“He had a girl and a mother.”

“How the hell do you know? I knew Wigmore well, my damned young cub. As well, that is, as anyone could know a fellow of that stamp.”

“I don’t know about damned and cub,” Hi said. “I’m not your father.”

The man stared at him for an instant with a look of fury, which died on the instant into contempt.

“I was talking about Wigmore,” he said. “If you think that this is a Sunday school, you’ll learn it isn’t.”

“I think no such thing,” Hi said. “But I won’t take ‘damned young cub’ from a hundred yards Blue, let alone his second cousin.”

“The hell you won’t,” the man said. “Well, I always liked guts, so we’ll reckon it not said.”

“All right,” Hi said. “As we were. I really thought that you were Wigmore. The book was from his mother, and the locket has a picture of his girl inside it. That was what made me think that he must have people alive.”

“He was a very odd fish, Wigmore,” the man said. “He was a man under a cloud. When you come to one of these solitary men, prospecting in a place like this, you may always be sure that there’s something wrong. He never talked about his past; but he let you see he had one. He drank like a fish, too.”

“Did he ever find any gold?” Hi asked.

“He was one of these pleasure-miners. They always get enough to pay their Indios and keep themselves in cartridges. They go brown after a bit; that is, they turn Indian.”

By this time, he had slung his rifle by its bandolier to the crutch in the post. Hi could see the initials D. W. burned upon the stock: it had been Wigmore’s rifle in the past. Hi was uneasy at the way the man spoke about Wigmore: he wished to know more.

“It’s a pretty awful end,” Hi said, “to die out here in the wilderness, all those thousands of miles from home.”

“Damned sight better end than being poisoned by doctors in a frowsy hospital.”

“I wish we could make out enough bits of letters to find out where his people are,” Hi said.

“There aren’t any letters, I told you.”

“There are bits of letters, because I saw them. Do you know, there is one way we could find out about him?”

“How?” the man asked, with a sudden close attention.

“From people in Santa Barbara. He had a letter addressed to him in the care of a French firm in Santa Barbara. I expect that they were his agents. There can’t be more than two or three French houses in Santa Barbara. I could enquire at them all, and through them we could easily find out where he came from.”

“Agents? A French firm?” the man said. “You mean Chardenal? It is a general stores in Santa Barb’. He used to get his stores there. They weren’t his agents: he was a customer there. As a matter of fact, I sent an Indio in with a chit to them when Wigmore died to cancel his last order. They know that he is dead.”

“Wouldn’t they know where he came from?”

“He was a very dark horse, Wigmore. He never told that to me, in all the months we were together. I don’t see why he should have told his grocers.”

“I suppose you don’t know any English town with a name ending in ‘allet,’ do you?” Hi asked.

“Allet?” the man said, suspiciously. “No, I don’t know any bally ‘allet.’ If you’d ask my opinion, I should say you were getting Wigmore on the brain. Are you sure you’ve not got a touch of forest fever? It often begins like that: getting excited about somebody’s bally corpse and that.”

“I’m not excited about him,” Hi said. “Only it is rather rough on his mother and girl, if they are wondering about him, and hoping to hear from him all this time.”

“As I said before,” the man said, “I don’t believe for one moment that he had a mother and girl. In all the months I knew him I never knew him mention them nor have any letter from them. Put him out of your mind. He was a dark horse and a tank. It’s my believe that he was wanted for something: anyway he was under a cloud. Now about yourself: you say you want to get to Anselmo? Is that near Santa Barbara? Well, if it is, it’s seventy miles from here; and here is twenty miles from any road there.”

“Could you let one of your Indios guide me to the road there, early to-morrow?” Hi asked. “My eyes are well enough. The swelling will probably be quite gone by to-morrow.”

“I couldn’t, to-morrow,” the man said.

“Why not? I’d be ever so much obliged if you would.”

“I couldn’t send an Indio to-morrow: he wouldn’t go if I did: it will be one of their moon-feasts.”

“Well, then; why not to-night?”

“You’re not fit to go to-night: besides, these Aracuis won’t move a step at night. I don’t blame them. The snakes are abroad. Then there are tigers. Besides, there are too many ghosts for them.”

“I would chance the ghosts,” Hi said, “if you would direct me on my way.”

“You would never find your way,” the man said. “I couldn’t hope to show it to you in a first quarter moon.”

“Will you show it to me to-morrow?”

“Yes, I’ll show it to you to-morrow.”

“Early; first thing? Would you mind starting early, so that I may reach the road before dark?”

“I’ll start fairly early.”

“Will you tell me what you are?” Hi said. “I mean, what you do out here in the wilderness?”

“I?” the man said. “I’m one of the damned lost souls, who like my own way and mind my own business.”

“Certainly,” Hi said. “I didn’t mean to be inquisitive.”

“You say you haven’t any money?”

“No.”

“Do you play cribbage?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not much fun playing anything without having something on the game. Haven’t you got a ticker?”

“Yes, but the water’s got into it. It’s stopped.”

“Then you haven’t got a tosser?”

“No.”

“Damn well on your uppers?”

“Yes.”

“My God, My Father, while I stray. You’d better go and turn in, then, if you want this early start. I can’t play beggar-my-neighbour with you, like a damned kid. Next time you look in, you’d better bring some ooftish to cover your cards with: your mess-bills, too, if you don’t mind.”

“I’m sorry that I’ve no money,” Hi said. “But as for mess-bills, if you’ll tell me your name and agents, I’ll pay what you think fair for what I have had here. Or you can take my watch. It is a good one and nearly new: it will go well when cleaned.”

“We’ll talk about bills to-morrow,” the man said. “You’d better go and turn in.”

“Very well. Good-night.”

The man did not answer. He stood staring at Hi out of his cold, hard blue eyes: his lip was lifted in a sneer. Hi felt that he had never yet met a man so hateful. “He is a loathsome swine,” he thought. “A vile, taunting, silver-ring tick.”

He came to his hut and again had the sensation that someone was there: this time so strongly that he called out. “Yes, who is it, there?” before he saw that there was no one. “It is odd,” he said, “I keep thinking that there’s a man here. I’ve got to be all jumpy from being in the forest; and then, this hammock-post is like a man, and gives me the illusion every time. I wish there were a man here, Dudley Wigmore or another; then I might not be so dependent on this sneering devil.”

Still raging against the man, he turned into his hammock to think of things which did not bear thought; Carlotta and Rosa depending on him; Carlotta’s marvellous grace, beauty and goodness; now in gaol among blackguards at the whim of a madman; then, himself, who was to have saved her, all astray in a forest, all those miles from even beginning to send word about her. There was no sleep for one with thoughts like that.

Sleep would not have been easy in any case, for the village was celebrating something, a hunt or a moon-feast: he could not tell what. Half a dozen drums were beating. Presently the boys of the tribe lit a bonfire in the midst of the _patio_ or space in the midst of the village. They piled it high with wood which the women had collected during the day. As soon as it burned well, they began to march round it, blowing into horns of one note and flutes of two notes: some of them clacked discs of hard wood or rattled beans in goobies: those who could not make music, sang. The little, sharp-eared dogs sitting on their haunches at the hut doors put back their heads, till they seemed all throat, and sang likewise. The babies wakened from their sleep wailed upon high notes. The men of the tribe sang or told stories: the women and little girls dragged wood for the fire.

“I might be a thousand miles from anywhere,” Hi thought. “It may take me days to get to Anselmo or anywhere else.”

The bonfire lit up the inside of his hut so as to shew the tin boxes marked D and W. Since he could not sleep, his mind turned to these boxes. “There is something queer about this man,” Hi said to himself. “There is something odd about his relations with Wigmore. He said something about these solitary prospectors being always bad eggs; well, he doesn’t strike one as being a very lofty egg. He says he went through Wigmore’s things and found no letters. I know that there were letters, which he pitched on to the rubbish pile only a little while ago. He made no effort to find Wigmore’s friends. It’s true that he says he sent in an account of his death; yet he wears Wigmore’s belt and uses his rifle. And then, to keep away from the poor chap while he was ill: good Lord.”

There rose in his mind suddenly the image of the forest fever, as a grey thing without a head, a thing like a worm, which said: “It is just after the rains now: very likely I have put a touch upon you, so that people will leave you in a hut till you are dead. It is a very catching complaint, the forest fever.”

“Very likely,” he said, “very likely I have caught the fever: in which case they’ll never know at home what became of me: no one will ever know, except the Indians who will bury me here.”

“I’m going to look in those boxes,” he said, turning out of his hammock. “Perhaps there is some map or chart, if Wigmore was a prospector. With a map I might be able to find out where I am and how to get away from here.”

He pulled out the nearer of the two tin boxes from its covering of creeper. It felt and proved to be empty save for two small studs and a trouser button. He tipped the box on its side, to make sure that there was no label or address. “No further help there,” he said. “Now for the other.”

The second box had been used to block a hole which the dogs had routed in the hut wall. It had been weighted inside with a biggish hewn stone, so that the dogs should not thrust it aside. Beside the stone were some scraps of rubbish which Hi brought out to the light to examine. The things were:

A buckle of a strap.

Two halves of a lead pencil which had fallen apart.

The lead of the pencil.

A mouldy piece of knotted ribbon, which looked as if it had once gone round a packet of letters.

Two sodden letters in envelopes, both post-marked Shepton Mallet, the one on February 1st, the other February 8th, 1886, and addressed, “Dudley Wigmore, Esq., c/o The United Sugar Company, Santa Barbara.” One of these letters was signed “from mother”: the other was from “your loving May.”

Last of all was a much-weathered, ant-eaten pocket-book, sodden with damp and so clutched together by a rubber band as to be liker a piece of mouldy wood than a book.

“This is queer,” Hi said. “These letters have been opened and carried about in a man’s pocket. They are dated only about thirteen months ago. Yet that fellow said that Wigmore died a couple of years ago.” Either Wigmore was alive a year ago, or that tick opened his letters a year after he was dead. It isn’t likely that that fellow could have made a mistake about Wigmore’s death. He said ‘a couple of years.’ One could hardly go wrong on a point of that sort. One would remember when the only white man within twenty miles died.

“Then that fellow said, that Wigmore was a prospector, a pleasure-miner, and drank like a fish. Now it’s odd that there are none of the prospector’s things here: no pans and sieves for washing, no scales nor any stuff for making assays. Then if he drank like a fish, it is odd that there are no bottles left. It wouldn’t have been easy to drink like a fish out here; but if he drank at all he drank from bottles, and there are no bottles nor parts of bottles. Now father said that any forest Indian would work for a week for a bottle, which is a very valuable possession here. They make bottles into lamps, canteens, jewels, knives, scrapers and arrow-heads. There isn’t a trace of a bottle in this settlement, that I can see. So probably Wigmore didn’t drink like a fish. Probably also he wasn’t a prospector. Probably also he didn’t die a couple of years ago, but a year at most. This man has been lying about him. If he lied about his life, probably he has lied about his death. There has been a Wigmore here; that Wigmore is probably dead. The man who knows about his death has his gun and cartridges, and perhaps also his gold-claim and his mining things. The man who lies about him has profited by his disappearance. Supposing this man, whoever he is, this hundred yards Blue man, should have murdered Wigmore, in order to take his things?

“Who is this hundred yards Blue man? I’ll bet that name isn’t his real name, but a false name given to make me think that he is related to decent people. He is not a gentleman nor a man of ordinary decent feeling: he is a tick or criminal. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he has murdered Wigmore. If he thinks that I think that, he’ll probably murder me. I don’t think he’d think twice about murdering a chap. I’ll have to be jolly careful to-morrow. But, first, I’ll look at this book, to see if it will help at all.”

The book proved to be little better than pulp. It had been at one time a neat oblong pocket-book with a cover of black leather: now the dye in the cover and the endpapers had soaked through into the leaves, which were stuck together and stained like crushed blackberries. In the centre were two leaves which contained some legible jottings in pencil in a neat handwriting. They were seemingly columns of names. Closer examination shewed Hi that they were lists of words in different tongues. The left hand columns contained English words, the other columns were the Indian words in different dialects.

“It’s a vocabulary or dictionary. A polyglot Indian dictionary,” Hi said. “That explains what the man was. He was one of these men who write books about the Indians, and Indian grammars. This isn’t the hand of a man who goes pleasure-mining. This chap was a scholar. The only prospecting this fellow did was finding a new tribe with a different dialect.”

He had been standing bent over the book close to the door of the hut, where the glow of the bonfire lit his examination. Something told him suddenly that he was being observed. Looking up, to his left, to the point prompted to him, he saw Letcombe-Bassett standing at the mouth of another hut, three parts hidden, watching him. “The beast has been spying on me,” Hi thought, turning away. “He knows that I think things are a little fishy: he has been watching to see what I have been doing.”

The thought of being spied upon made him at first uneasy, then gay. “If it comes to spying,” he thought, “I’ll see if I cannot lead you a dance.”

He put the book on the shelf of the post for the night: then he turned into his hammock, thinking uneasy thoughts till he was almost asleep.

He was lying high up in his hammock, with his head propped by what sailors would have called the nettles. A faint noise at the mouth of his hut made him instantly alert: someone had crept stealthily thither, breathing anxiously.

“Yes? Who is there?” Hi called.

“Oh, are you awake?” Letcombe-Bassett answered. “I was going quietly so as not to wake you. I was afraid you might be asleep. I only wanted to say that we’ll start in good time to-morrow, if you feel up to moving.”

“To Anselmo? I’m up to moving.”

“I know nothing about Anselmo. I can start to set you on a road which will take you to Santa Barbara.”

“That will do. Thank you.”

“Right. We’ll start then after an early chow. Sleep easy.”

He moved across the hut entrance towards his own hut; Hi wished him good-night. “He’s a pretty bad egg,” Hi thought. “He is here for no good and he means me no good.”

These thoughts in his brain slowly merged into the noises of the village, which in turn grew into a night that covered him: he fell asleep in his hammock half covered by a quilt of cotton.

On this the sixth day of Hi’s journey, the five hundred odd men of Don Manuel’s army made their first march of fifty miles to the eastward, so as to camp at the water-holes at Amarga. At the water-holes, they were joined by some seventy more men, who had either followed them, or ridden in from the north or south. When they left Amarga they were more than six hundred strong.

XVI

It may have been the cold working upon a body worn by anxieties and hardships: it may have been confusion in a brain nine-tenths asleep; or it may have been another thing. As he slept, Hi became aware that Dudley Wigmore was in the hut, sitting on a box, waiting for him to wake. He could see him distinctly; a sad-looking man, of the middle build, fair-haired, blue-eyed, gentle and thoughtful, yet with a clench of resolution, in mouth and chin, which made the face memorable.

“I’m an ethnologist,” Wigmore was saying. “You want to escape from here without fail. This is Murder Poblacion.”

“Is it?” Hi answered. “By George, did that tick murder you? Wait a minute: I’ll be awake in a minute: then, I’ll ask you something.” He struggled with his sleep as he spoke, beating aside the quilt. He sat up to see Wigmore beside him, sad-eyed, resolute, yet in some way remote from this world. Wigmore was looking at him with a look so sad that he could hardly bear it; he was plainly there, in a suit of old drill, real and touchable. Yet in an instant Hi saw the thatch of the hut wall through the man’s body: the body was and then was not, like mist in a change of wind: Dudley Wigmore was gone.

“By George,” Hi said. “This is Murder Poblacion. I want to escape from here. That was pretty real. By George, if that wasn’t a dream, I’ve seen a ghost. I believe that that was Wigmore’s ghost.”

He was not scared by the ghost, if it were a ghost; it had come with too serious a warning for that. He was thrilled through with excitement; he was pitted against a murderer in a place twenty miles from friend or weapon.

“Golly,” he said. “That proves it to my mind. I’ve no further doubt that that man murdered Wigmore: he did.”

As he turned out of his hammock, he saw that it was almost dawn: the young men were mustering to a hunt. One of them began to make a melancholy noise upon a flute, to which the others answered by tapping upon their blow-pipes. Women were already at work at the cassava presses or at splitting away the twigs from the branches brought for firing. The young men moved off into the forest: the young women in a group moved off to bathe: the babies, dogs, pigeons and parrots came all to life at once: none but the grown men remained in their hammocks, even they were smoking.

“I’ll go through that pocket-book by daylight,” Hi said. “Perhaps I shall be able to make out rather more of it, when I have the light.” He put his hand to the shelf for the book, and found it gone: it had not fallen to the floor nor into his hammock: it was gone.

“I say,” Hi thought. “That fellow must have been watching me last night, to some purpose. That was why he crept to the door, that first time. When I was asleep, he must have crept in again and bagged it from where I put it. All right. It’s just as well to know that he is roused. I am roused, too. But, by Jove, he’ll never let me get to Anselmo, now that it has come to this.”

He was standing, thinking these thoughts, with a daunted heart, near the door of his hut, when a sentence floated into his mind as clearly as though a voice had spoken in his ear. “He will never let you get to Anselmo,” the sentence came. “Look out for him.”

It came with the distinctness of personality from the depths of his being to voice the thought matured there. “It is true,” he repeated, “he will never let me go. I must look out for him. But what am I to do?”

He had no time to think of what he was to do, because at that moment Letcombe-Bassett appeared: he seemed to be in a much better temper than hitherto.

“So you’re up,” he said. “Good. There’s nothing like the bally dawn in these bally tropics: one soon gets into forest habits here: they are the only ways that keep one alive here. As soon as Chug-chug brings our chow, we’ll pasea.”

“It’s jolly good of you,” Hi said, “to see me off upon my road.”

“Not a bit,” the man answered. “Out here, an Englishman with another Englishman, that is the least one could do.”

Hi thought that to see a man off the premises is perhaps the least that one can do: he also thought that the man’s mood had strangely changed for the better since the night before. Then he had been savage at the thought of showing the way: now he was eager to show it. It occurred to him that there might be a reason for this change, and that this reason, coming from an unpleasant nature, might be an unpleasant one.

“I suppose I might reach the road before to-night?” Hi said.

“Reach what road?”

“The road to Santa Barbara?”

“Oh, that road,” the man said. “I’m not so sure.”

“But you said it was only twenty miles.”

“Did I? Hell. Well, it’s more than that. But I suppose you might reach it. Yes, if you’re not lamed or crocked or ill you ought to reach it.”

“And can you let me take some food and water?”

“You’d better not take those here: you’ll only have to lug them along. No. We’ll stop at another settlement, some miles from here, and get a swag and a gooby for you there. Then you won’t have so much to carry. But here is Chug-chug with the chow. I always have chocolate, Spanish-fashion here, for breakfast. A man has to be pretty hard up to drink maté in cold blood. I’d as soon drink swipes at a wedding.”

After breakfast, the man suggested that they should start. He had his sporting rifle under his arm and his bandolier buckled to him. Hi kept his eyes from resting on the letters D. W. so plainly stamped upon them. He had taken pains to avoid any reference to D. W. He wondered, as they set out, whether he would not come to know the contents of that rifle during the course of the morning. He wondered whether that was why the man had dissuaded him from taking food and drink. “Naturally, if I’m going to be shot,” he thought, “he won’t want to waste food and drink as well as a cartridge. But am I going to be shot? Does he intend to kill me? How am I to dodge it, if he does? I can’t refuse to go with him. That would bring things to a crisis at once. I must go with him, and look alive and trust to my luck. The worse I expect, the better I shall find.”

The man led the way out of the village, across the river, where the Indians were bathing, to a narrow path through a cane-brake. The set of the path was to the south and west, which Hi knew could not be the course for Santa Barbara.

“This can’t be the way,” Hi said. “Santa Barbara must be north and east of this.”

“Of course it is,” the man said. “But this is the way. It swings north after a bit, but anyway you have to go west first of all, to clear the marshes. All the mountain water which isn’t soaked up by the trees seeps out at the foothills and makes marsh. You’d better let me lead you.”

“Lead the way, then,” said Hi. “It’s jolly good of you to trouble.” He thought that at any rate it was jolly good to have the man with the gun in front of him. The path was a well-trodden, very narrow Indian track, running irregularly between walls of high growing canes, which glittered and rattled. They had hard golden shafts from which pale sheaths, like corn-husks, peeled. High up, seven feet above his head, their shoots were bluish or seemed bluish from the sky above; while the sky in the narrow gash above was greenish from their yellowness. The path curved in and out, exactly as the leader of the tribe had swerved from snag or snake long years before, when the Indians had first gone that way. It was impossible to keep direction after the first few minutes. The most that Hi could say was that he never headed to the east, because he never had the sun in his eyes.

“We’ll keep forest habits, going,” the man said. “We’ll not speak on the trail.”

Hi was much relieved at not having to talk. He watched the man’s back in front of him, going on and on with the head down. “What is the brute thinking?” Hi wondered. “How soon he shall turn round and bowl me over? Or what a neat job he made of Wigmore and how it can be bettered? Or is he debating whether I’m too much of a kid to bother about? As to that, I wouldn’t mind betting that he’s made up his mind to do for me. The question is, when?”

That was the main question; but the other questions were not answered, they recurred continually, the question, “Will he?” and the other question, “What can I do to stop him?”

There seemed to be no likely way of stopping him. Hi’s mind was working very clearly and weighing all likely chances. The man was armed; he was carrying his rifle at the ready. He was a quick man, probably trained by years in the forest to wheel and make snapshots suddenly. He was a strong man, much stronger certainly than Hi. If Hi were to dart in upon him, to seize the gun, he would certainly settle Hi without trouble; being stronger, quite as active, much more dangerous, and in better condition. If Hi were to lag behind a little and then turn and run back, he would only run to this man’s village, where no one could direct him to safety, and all would tell which way he had taken. If he were to leap to the side into the cane-brake, he might be lucky; he might by some miracle leap into cover which would hide him: far more probably he would at the first spring land in some thicket which would hold him, like another Absalom, till his enemy could deal with him. Even if he were not shot in the first minutes he would still be alone in the bush, lost, not knowing his whereabouts nor his course. He might wander for days there without finding a way out.

“What I must do,” he thought, “is to wait, if he’ll let me, till I can see some real chance of escaping, and then take my chance: the first that comes: any way of getting away: there’s none at present.

“But why does he lead me all this way? We must be three miles from the village. If he had only wanted to get rid of me, he could have potted me long ago and put me on an ant’s nest. Perhaps, after all, he is setting me on my way to Anselmo or to the road. By Jove, if he is running straight, I’ll apologise to him. But I’ll bet he isn’t. He’s got something in his mind and the time for our settlement hasn’t come yet.”

They went on in Indian file through the cane-brake, neither speaking, with strange thoughts and threats passing from one to the other, till the cane-brake gave way to a jungle, which arched over the path, shutting out the sky. They walked in a tunnel of greenness, pierced with slats of glare, down which flakes of living glitter and colour floated and soared, or sometimes paused as butterflies. Hi looked for some place to his right side into which he could dart for safety: no place shewed there. The man led on without uttering a word.

After half a mile of the tunnel of the jungle, Hi saw in front of him the glare of a clearing, and at the same moment felt or heard a call within his mind, to look to his right side. Afterwards he decided that he heard the call as sound and at the same time felt it within him as warning. He looked, as the call bade, to his right side, with the sense that that part of the wood was evil. It looked more than usually black and joyless, being a thick cover of trees made like stage Druids with lichens. Yet at the point where he looked there was a space of mournfulness, in the midst of which, upon a mound from which a foot protruded, he saw the figure of Dudley Wigmore, as he had appeared at the hut the night before. The face was sad as it had been the night before: it had a look of hopeless brooding.

Hi was quite certain that he had seen it: he looked for one second: it was certainly there: he looked again: it certainly was not there; though the foot was there, a white man’s foot, in a boot. He looked to his front instantly, just in time to catch the look of Letcombe-Bassett, who glanced back at that moment to see what he was looking at.

“We’re nearly there now,” he said.

Hi felt that they were, but answered: “Surely not at the road?”

“No,” the man said, “not at the road, but what we’re coming to.”

“How far have we come?” Hi asked. “Four miles?”

“Call it two and a bit.”

“It seems more, in this forest,” Hi said.

“I’m used to this forest,” the man said. “Do you find it gloomy at all?”

“No,” Hi said. “Not when I can see the sunlight.”

“The last bit is a bit gloomy,” the man said. “It would be a good place for putting anyone away, if anyone were inclined that way.”

“I suppose it would,” Hi said, becoming very watchful. “I didn’t consider it in that light. I suppose you always run some risk from Indians in a forest like this? Or are you too much feared by the Indians?”

“You never know where you stand with Indians,” the man answered. “But this is the sort of place they would choose, if they wanted me to pass over Jordan. And no one would be any the wiser. One would be bones in a week and green plantation in two: undiscoverable; just like part of the world.”

He led the way into a space which had been cleared not very long before by many men working together. Hi knew that Dudley Wigmore had been murdered by this man at the spot over which they had just passed. That was Wigmore’s foot sticking from the grave; that was Wigmore’s wraith dreeing his weird there. How soon was he to be added to Wigmore’s grave by those hands now playing upon the rifle?

“There now, what do you think of that?” the man asked, nodding ahead.

That was a stone temple carven with gods by some race long since forgotten. It had been covered by jungle until a few months before: now by many burnings, hackings and tearings its face had been cleared and its doorway laid open.

“What do you think of that?” the man repeated.

“I suppose it is one of these Indian temples,” Hi said.

“Yes,” the man said, “one that hasn’t been touched. Do you know anything about these places?”

“No,” Hi said, “I’m afraid I don’t.”

“What do you think of it?”

“It’s very grand.” Indeed it was very grand, being in two orders of colossal architecture, carven to the cornice with grotesques of gods. It seemed to Hi to be five cricket pitches long. It was built with a tough stone facing over brick. Wherever trees had broken the facing, the brick core was laid bare: they were small bricks laid in a mortar like melted flint spread very thin. The bricks were rose-red and seemingly as tough as stone. All the roof of this temple was covered with trees, shrubs, plants and flowers, beautiful exceedingly. It occurred to Hi that this was the sort of place for which Dudley Wigmore may have come prospecting.

“I’ve had the men at work at this one for some time now,” the man said. “I’m getting it a bit clear now. Where do you suppose the treasure would be?”

“I suppose the Spaniards got all the treasure at the conquest.”

“Not from this one: they never came near this one.”

“I’ll bet they did,” Hi said.

“Well, I know they didn’t,” the man said. “This place was lost in the jungle centuries before the Spaniards came. I can prove it: look here.”

He led Hi to the temple door, in front of which a great heart tree had once grown. This tree had been sawn through and removed: the near-by ground was all burnt and scattered with its wreck.

“There’s the proof,” the man said, “that tree was blocking the main door long before the Spaniards landed. Count the rings in the stump.”

“That’s true,” Hi said, glancing at the countless rings. “But don’t these tropical trees put on more than one ring in a year?”

“No, they don’t,” the man said. “Whereabouts inside do you suppose the treasure is?”

“I suppose under the altar, wherever that would be. But the people would have taken it with them when they went from here.”

“They didn’t go from here.”

Hi waited: he knew that the man wanted his help in some way in this treasure-hunt. He would not ask any question which might bring in or suggest Wigmore. He was certain that Wigmore had discovered this place and had been murdered because of it. Any knowledge which the man had was Wigmore’s.

“It will be hard work,” Hi said, “to get inside this place.”

“Nothing like the work of getting to it. The roof hasn’t fallen.”

“I’ll be surprised if it hasn’t,” Hi said, “with the weight of the trees growing on it.”

“The roof can’t fall,” the man said. “These builders couldn’t vault a roof. That is why this place is so narrow. The roof is of slabs of stone laid upon balks of stone. It’s as strong as a hill. It is all enormous walls, with narrow rooms inside them. There’s a certain amount of mess inside, of course: these tropics sprout like sewage, but it can be easily cleared: that is, fairly easily.”

“It would be interesting work,” Hi said, “to get inside and see what it’s like.”

“Interesting? I believe you,” the man said. “This place was built by the Quetzals, whoever they may have been. They had a picture writing of sorts and kept a history in it. They’ve got rolls of their history in Santa Barb’; people have been deciphering it. Nothing much is known of them yet, for they were gone before the Spaniards came. Now I’ve reason to believe that this place is the great temple of the Quetzals; the Temple of the sun, or the Temple of Gold. It was a legend when the Spaniards came, as I expect you know: they heard of it: they often looked for it, but they never found it; the forest fever saw to that. Except by a sort of miracle no one could have found it. The Quetzals were a great race: you’ll see their cities up in Melchior; but the fever came in and wiped them out. I believe that this old god-shop is bung full of gold.”

“What gold?” Hi asked.

“Gold of offerings.”

“That would be exciting.”

“The Sacramento would be a fool to it.”

“Do you know that they offered gold?”

“They offered all the gold they found, so the histories say: thousands of pounds for hundreds of years: believe some of what you see and a tenth of what you hear: it is still likely that they brought a lot of gold here, and here it is still.”

“That will be a find.”

“Well, what do you say to giving me a hand to get it? I’ve cleared this space by the help of the Indians, but I’m not going to have these Indians looking for the gold: not likely. That is the white man’s perk: none of my brown brothers in this for me: no fear: the hunting parties would go wearing gold till the Barboes learned of it: news soon spreads in this forest. Then we should have the Government in. As you can see, it’s more than a one man’s job in there, but I reckon that two could shift the stuff and find the altar. And we’d need two to get the gold melted down and into Santa Barb’. They buy it there, pesos for weight, at the Assay Office. I tell you, the Ballarat field is just footle to it. This is Tom Tiddler’s ground, that the kids play.”

“It sounds pretty thrilling,” Hi said.

“Thrilling? I guess it is thrilling: p.d. thrilling.”

“I’m awfully keen on getting to Anselmo first,” Hi said.

“I know you are,” the man said, “I know you are. But what is Anselmo beside what I offer you here? We should shift our traps to here for a couple of weeks, and after that what would Anselmo be? Why, you would be able to buy Anselmo: buy it ten times over and all that’s in it: miss and mister. And I’d be a lord at home and have a bloody deer-park.”

“Yes, I know,” Hi said. “I say, it sounds exciting. But have you any picks and crow-bars?”

“Yes, in a stone trough there: out of the way of the ants.”

“I suppose we could get done in a couple of weeks?”

“We’ll have to, for the sooner we lift it the better. Not that anyone will come.”

“You mean that the fever will come down?”

“No, but these Aracuis go talking: and news spreads. Shall we start, then? What do you say? Off saddle and at it?”

“I’d like to, frightfully,” Hi said.

“Well, here you are then,” the man said. “I’ll give you a third share in anything we find: very likely a million pounds.”

“I say, that’s generous. But before we start work,” Hi said, “I’d like frightfully just to walk along the building and look at it, from close to. I’ve never seen one of these places before.”

“Look your bellyful,” the man said. “I hoped you’d see sense when it came to the point. I’ll get the picks along.”

The man kept his eyes upon Hi, who took a pace back to consider the front of the building. He did not see the temple: it was all a blur of angry gods topped by a foam of flowers and the spears of palms in a glare of light as red as blood. He knew that the man was watching him: he knew that the man had killed Wigmore so that he might be alone in possession. The facts of the murder were all bright in his brain. Wigmore, the scholar, had found the place and cleared it. Then this man, the wanderer and waster, had come thither, by some Fate or chance, and had murdered Wigmore. Now that he himself had come thither, the man wished him to help in the finding and the raising of the treasure. If he refused, he would have a bullet in his brain within ten seconds. If he accepted, he would have a week’s or a fortnight’s toil: then the bullet. If he tried to escape, what hope had he, save to wander in the fever forest in the fever season till he died miserably or was lost in the marsh?

“We’ll start in that door where the tree was,” the man said. “It may not have been the main entrance, but the stone is all worn away there by people’s feet: it is a used entrance.”

“All right,” Hi said, with the words sticking in his throat. He did not know what he was to do; there was nothing that he could do. He felt suddenly that there was nothing for it but to plunge into the forest, cost what it might. “I’ll never get out of it,” he thought. “But anything to get away from this fellow.”

The building faced him, running north and south across the clearing. They were standing close together nearly opposite the central point.

“Well, have you looked enough?” the man asked. “You’ll have plenty of chance to look at it in the next ten days or so.”

“I’d like to go along the side of it once,” Hi said. “I’d like to pace it.”

“Pace away,” the man said. “It’s 120 yards, but you’ll want to know for yourself, I suppose.”

“Have you measured it, then?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’d like just to pace it and see it close to.”

He turned south from the man along the line of gods to the end of the temple, which had not been cleared of creepers; the forest came to it and cloaked it there. He turned here to look along the line of the building. What struck him most was its silence, its blood-red colour where the facings had fallen, and the fact that every inch of it bore life of some sort. The man was watching him and playing with his rifle; he was sitting on the stone trough which contained the tools, much as a cat, having a mouse in a shelterless space, will drop him, withdraw a few paces, look at the sky and lick her fur. Hi pretended to examine the carving: he felt that the man must know what was passing in his mind. “I must start pacing,” he thought.

He lifted his eyes towards the other end of the building. Dudley Wigmore was standing there, facing him, with his right hand upon the building, and with his left beckoning to him to come. It was very strange: he was there and yet he was not there: he certainly saw him: then lost him: then knew that someone sad was there who wanted him to go there. “Right, I’ll go,” he thought; so he set out, pacing and counting.

When he came to the central door, abreast of the man, he was hailed. “You needn’t go any further, chum. The other half is exactly the same, another sixty yards.”

“I’m going to the end,” Hi said. “I believe your figures are wrong. I believe you’re four yards out.”

“A pace won’t beat a yard-measure, chum.”

“I’ll talk in a minute,” Hi answered, still counting. “Just a minute, if you don’t mind: I don’t want to lose count.”

He went on counting mechanically, thinking of a strangely different mark of a vanished race not far from his home in Berkshire. Someone had told him long before that that monument was 375 feet long. He counted his pacing of this temple wondering if it would not prove to be the same, and if it were the same why it should be. All the time he was terrified, lest he should be shot in the back: the sweat was dripping from him. Hope kept surging up in him that he might escape: despair kept urging him to fling himself at the man’s feet and squeal for mercy. All sorts of thoughts, of home and Carlotta and the things he wanted to do, seemed to be protecting him. His life was from second to second; “eighty-one,” he was alive, “eighty-two,” no bullet, “eighty-three,” not dead yet. Dudley Wigmore was there: he could see his expression; very sad, yet hopeful. Dudley Wigmore was not there; the end of the temple was there, in a great corner-god, helmeted in the snake and eagle, whose mouth crunched the leg of a man. By this time he was up to the hundred. Suddenly Dudley Wigmore was there again, showing him the forest beyond the end of the temple: the ground was sloping down there in a cover of greyish thorn and greenish scrub, topped by what looked like ilex. He went on pacing, repeating his count aloud: “a hundred and ten; a hundred and fifteen.”

“Hey, chum,” the man called. “Hold on a minute. Wait for me a moment.”

Possibly he began to suspect suddenly: at any rate, he snapped-to the breech of his rifle, rose, and began to walk steadily towards Hi.

“I’m just finishing,” Hi called. “I’m sure it must be more than you make it. I make it 127 paces.” He turned to see where the man was, measured his distance as about fifty yards, and then quietly, as though exploring some ruin at home, turned the corner of the building.

The instant that he was out of sight, he darted across the end of the temple into cover: he forced his way through the scrub, ducked well down into it so as to be hidden, and ran downhill as he had never run. He had gone perhaps seventy yards, head down and arms across eyes against the thorns, when something hard took him across the leg, just below the knee, so that he fell headlong violently into a thicket. It was a severe fall, which knocked all the breath out of him. He came to himself with a pain in his leg. “I’ve been shot,” he thought, “shot and hit in the leg.”

Up above him on the plateau of the temple, he heard Letcombe-Bassett call: “Chum. Heya, chum. Are you there, chum?” He heard him probe at some of the near-by cover, seemingly with the barrel of his rifle. “I’ve not been shot,” Hi thought, “I fell over a snag.” He dared not stir a muscle, he hardly dared to breathe: Letcombe-Bassett seemed so near, almost looking down upon him.

“Sing out, chum,” Letcombe-Bassett called. “Where have you got to? Answer.” He listened for an answer, and, having none, muttered a curse.

“You needn’t pretend that you can’t hear me,” he called again. “You’re within a few yards: so answer: don’t play the giddy goat.”

Hi’s heart was thumping in his throat, yet he smiled at this order, it was so like the call of a cross seeker, in hide and seek, in the shrubs at Tencombe, bidding the hiders to call “Cuckoo again.”

“Now cheese it, chum: come off with this kidding: where are you? Cut this right out.”

There was a pause after this, while Letcombe-Bassett listened, not so much for an answer, as for some sound, which would show him where Hi was. Hi kept still as a stone, which was not easy, for he had fallen into an uneasy posture, in a thicket which was the breeding or roosting place of minute scarlet midges. These things surveyed him for a few seconds, then, having decided that he would be good to eat, they settled upon him. There were perhaps fifty of them, each with the theory that the nearer the bone the sweeter the meat. Their bite was by far sharper than the bite of the spotted-winged marsh-midge at home. But far worse than the bite was the pertinacity with which they thrust down his neck, into his ears, up his nostrils, or down to the roots of his hair, before they bit. Hi longed to beat them from him and scratch as he had never scratched. Letcombe-Bassett listened, making no sound.

“Chuck it, chum,” he called at last. “I know you’re there. You won’t kid this nigger: I’m not that sort. You’d better come out. If I come in to fetch you, you’ll sing a different song, my lad.”

Seeing that threats had as little effect as persuasion, he tried again, with an appeal to reason. “Look here, kid,” he said, “I’m only speaking for your own good. You’ll never find your way out of this. You’ll get bushed to a dead cert, just as you were before. And if you get bushed in this part, God help you. There’ll be no kind white man to give you chow; don’t think it. If a snake doesn’t do you, a tiger will. Or if a woods Indian finds you, he’ll eat you: to say nothing of the fever. Come on out of it, like a sensible kid and turn-to at the temple. . . .

“If you think I’m not offering you enough, you’ve only to say the word. I’ll go you an honest half, share and share alike, in all we find: I can’t say squarer. I wouldn’t do it for many people; but I like you, because you’ve got guts, and so I tell you straight.”

“That’s why Doll Tearsheet loved Falstaff,” Hi thought, not stirring. “An odd taste, but love is blind. What will be his next move?” Letcombe-Bassett paused to consider and to listen.

“All right, chum,” he called at last. “I’ll remember this. You needn’t pretend to me that you’ve got clear away. I’m not so easily fooled as you may think. You’re within earshot and very well within range; kindly remember that. Are you going to come along and bear a hand?” He waited for ten seconds for an answer, then said,

“I’ll give you while I count seven: if you don’t come before then, I’ll come in and fetch you. I know where you are. As a matter of fact I can see you from here.” This was thrilling hearing, though Hi believed (and earnestly hoped) that it was not true. The man gave it a few seconds to work upon his victim’s mind; then he began to count.

“Very well, then: while I count seven. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. This is your last chance, I warn you straight. Are you coming? Very well, then. . . . Seven. I think I may promise you that you’ll regret this, my young friend. You’re within easy shot-gun range, and I’ll walk you up like I’d walk up partridges. I gave you a square deal, but you asked for trouble. Don’t blame me, if you get it.”

At that instant, from somewhere in the forest, perhaps thirty yards from where Hi had entered it, a piece of a dead bough fell to the ground, with a noise which to Hi was exactly that of one slipping on wet earth and recovering. To Letcombe-Bassett it gave a much-desired clue.

“Right,” he called. “Thank you for telling me where you are; now we’ll see. My Indians say you stink. You’ll stink worse before I’ve done with you, my young whelp.”

At this he burst into cover in the direction of the fallen bough; but as the jungle happened to be thick there, he gave it up, went back into the open, cast about for Hi’s marks, and re-entered at the very place where Hi had entered. When once within the scrub, he seemed to neglect tracks and again tried to force a passage to where the bough had fallen. He beat the cover as he went. It was all dry, feathery, fronded cover, sweetly smelling when crushed, but abounding in scarlet midges. Hi heard him slap at his cheeks and curse: he himself felt that he was being eaten alive, yet he could not stir.

“All right,” the man called. “Don’t think I’ve done with you. You’ve not done me yet. Since I know you’re not over here, I know you must be over there; and when I get you, you’ll get the kibosh put on all this poppycock; you wait.”

The man cast back along the fringe of the cover, beating it, as far as Hi could judge, with care. The wood there was all sage-green sari-sari plants, easy to thrust through but confusing to see in, as the fern-like shoots grew thick to the ground. When he had made a cast of about sixty yards, he turned, to make a cast back, a little further into the wood. Hi heard him come nearer.

“The brute,” Hi thought, “he knows something about hunting; he’ll cast to and fro like a shuttle till he lands right on to me. My only chance will be to trip him and try to bag his gun.”

The man came slowly back, searching: Hi heard him kick at the undergrowth, shake aside boughs, slap at the midges, and whistle between his teeth. Sometimes he sang, in a voice no bigger than a hum, the first line of a song:

“There were three flies; three merry, merry flies.”

He would stop here, as though he knew no more of the words, hum through the tune, or whistle it, in a groom’s whistle, between his teeth, and then sing the refrain: “Whack fol lol tiddly ido.” All the time, he was drawing nearer, beating the cover; presently he was at the end of his beat, and turning to beat back a little further into the forest. “I’m sixty or seventy yards into the forest from the clearing,” Hi reckoned. “He has gone roughly through half of that. Now he’s getting really near, and this time he may see me.”

The man seemed to think that he was drawing near to the quarry. “Do you hear?” he called, “you’re not dealing with anybody; you’re dealing with me. I don’t give up when I begin a thing: I do it. This cast or the next you’ll be sorry, my little sucking swine.” He came back, upon his new line, beating as before, and muttering to himself: “Oh, not in there? No, but not far off and not much longer. Damn these flies. If I’d a dog I’d damn soon flush this puppy. Come on out of it, you young swine. My good golly, I’ll take your pelt off in return for all these midges: so much I’ll promise you.”

He came slowly along, drawing nearer to Hi. He seemed to take hours over each few yards of ground. Hi understood now how it comes to pass that hunted men, with prices on their heads, will sometimes give themselves up. He had not come to that point yet, but it was no longer out of his thought. The man came near to Hi, passed him, still muttering, beating and singing, and so slowly went to the end of his beat.

“Now for it,” Hi thought. With the utmost care he moved his hand, so as to smear it, for one delicious instant, over his face: it was the only relief possible: the next instant, he heard the man turn and come swiftly straight towards him. Could he have heard or seen him moving?

“That’s where you are, is it, my cock,” the man called. “Right you are.”

Hi was tempted to leap and run for it. The words went through him like shots; but he gripped himself, and said, “No, this man deals in bluff; he’s bluffing now to make me stir.” He lay still, while the man came straight towards him. There was no song of the flies now, he was walking with some fixed intention as though to a mark. He stopped at about nine yards from where Hi lay. Hi could see both his leggings and boots.

“Now then,” the man said. “Now then, my sucking dove; you’re somewhere just about here. I know you must be. I’m quite content to stay here all day, waiting till you squeal. I’ve done as much for a rabbit I’d got no quarrel against. I’d do more for you, let me tell you. You won’t tire me, when I’m fixed on a thing. Are you going to surrender and ask my pardon? Well, if you won’t answer, you’re wise; for you’re going to get a bullet in your guts before you’re much older: you can save your breath to squeal with.”

He came two paces nearer through the scrub. Hi could see the fronds of the talpas moving above him as he forced his way through. Just beyond the talpas was a space of earth littered with yellow fungus. “When the beast comes on to that,” Hi thought, “he’ll be bound to see me; he must see me.”

The man wrestled through the talpas on to the bare space and kicked the fungus aside. “Yellow stink-horn,” he said. He was within six feet of Hi; he had only to stoop to see him.

Then at that instant, with a sudden startling leap, somewhere to the right of the man and behind Hi, something big arose in the cover and ran for it. The man was prepared for a jump of the sort: he leaped to one side with a cry: “Ah, there you go. So you think you’ll try that.” Hi saw him clearly for an instant, standing tense, trying to see the leaping thing, whatever it was. Then, as he could not see, he leaped into the covert after it, shouting, “Stop, or I’ll plug you.” Two yards further on, he may have had a glimpse of a quarry, for he fired, jerked out the shell, snapped in a second shell and fired again, quicker than Hi had thought possible. Hi heard him mutter: “Got him. That touched him where he lived; but I’ve got to get to him, to make sure.”

The man stood for an instant, trying to see. “He’s down,” he muttered. “Or is he down?” The noise still came to them of something moving: perhaps after all he hadn’t got him. Hi heard him jerk out the shell and snap in another. “Well, I’ll soon make sure,” he muttered. “It wasn’t a bad shot for nine-tenths guess-work, if I did get him. I’d have given something to have seen him cop the spike. These stinking kids think themselves someone at school: then they come here as though the earth belonged to them: they have to learn what they amount to.”

He moved away into the wood. Hi heard him there beating shrubs at about a hundred yards from him. At that distance he was not likely to hear small movements in the bush; Hi was able to change his position to a thicker patch of scrub and to deal with the midges. After an hour of searching, Letcombe-Bassett became silent. “He’s resting,” Hi thought, “or waiting for some sign. He thinks that if I’m alive I shall think that he is gone and get up to go; while, if I am dead, the carrion-birds or those beastly ‘betes-puants’ will show where I am.”

Letcombe-Bassett was in fact waiting for just those reasons. He had nothing better to do: he enjoyed snap-shooting and would gladly wait all day for a shot: he had besides found cause to believe that Hi had not budged. Presently, he came nearer to Hi and called, “All right, son, my Indios will be here at twelve with chow. We’ll see how you feel with some Indio trackers after you.” This was the last threat for the time: after this he came slowly up the hill, kicking or beating at some patches, though not searching them as on his way down. He passed within fifteen yards of Hi, somewhere out of sight in the talpas and sari-sari. In a few minutes, Hi heard him burst through a patch of crackle into the clearing.

“He’s going to wait for the Indian trackers,” Hi thought. “Or is that just a ruse of his? I wonder how long it is to twelve.”

XVII

He reckoned that he had breakfasted before seven, and had been at the ruin before nine: perhaps it was eleven now. Almost at once, he heard the chant of Indians and the drone of a pipe coming towards the clearing. “My luck is out again,” he thought. “Here are the Indians: this is where I shall stop, then.” He heard Letcombe-Bassett hail the Indians: he was still close to, at the edge of the clearing. Hi could hear the goobies clatter as the men trotted across to him. He heard the man address them, explaining what he wished them to do; and the grunting of the Indians as they understood and assented.

He was tempted to rise and run; but the memory of the swiftness of the man’s shooting held him back. “He would have half a dozen shots in the first half minute,” he thought, “and then the Indians would run me down. I’ve no chance that way; but this way I may get one bang at an Indian, if not at him.” He squirmed down into his patch, while the man led the Indians to the spot where he had entered cover some hours before. “Leu-in, hounds, eleu, ed-hoick,” the man called. The Indians came into cover, just like hounds, and began to cast, with little cries and ejaculations, like the whimper of hounds, feathering yet not quite owning to it. “Ed-hoick,” the man called. “Yooi, pash him up. Hoik to Chaunter: hoik. Hoik to Dowsabel. Yooi, yooi, yooi; fetch him out.”

“We all know you’ve been terrier-boy to the North Surrey,” Hi thought with bitterness. “You need not advertise the fact.”

The hounds came eastwards in a very wide cast. “It’s a drive,” Hi thought. “They’re going to make a semi-circle, and drive me up to the gun. He’s going to stay in the clearing, to pot me when I break.”

He had not time to consider the matter, for the Indians were moving swiftly to him, some above him, some below, and one straight for him. They were on the work they did best in the world. They were doing it with enjoyment, with little quick cries, one to another. “No power on earth can stop that Indian from seeing me,” Hi thought. “He’s coming straight for me.” In an instant the Indian had thrust aside the scrub, so that Hi saw him plainly. He was a short, squat, plump young Indian brave, in a cotton shirt; he had long black hair sleeked down with fat; he had a gold half-moon in his nose; he carried a spear, and bore a blow-pipe on his back. Their eyes met. Hi had never seen him before, that he could remember. He was a broad-faced, high-cheek-boned man, with hardly any nose, like most of the tribe. He looked at Hi and Hi at him for one marvellous second, in which they understood each other. So will a man and dog meet, understand and pass on, with no word said, yet the dog wagging his tail. The Indian smiled and passed on, and Hi knew that it was all right.

The little quick cries became a little louder, that was all, some sort of a message passed down the line, to let the Indians know.

Presently the Indians moved up into the clearing to report that the white man had escaped.

Their going was like the lifting of the cloud at the passing of the line-squall. Hi knew that there had been an overwhelming change in his fortunes, brought about by no merit of his own, but by something fortunate that happened. He had been upon the rack for hours: now he was suddenly free. He cleared his face and hands of midges, though their bites no longer seemed to matter. He rolled over, with a sigh of delight at being alive, and fell asleep.

Sometimes in childhood he had dreamed a recurring dream, of a most beautiful grave spirit of a woman, whom he knew as his “Elder Sister Ruth.” In his dreams, this spirit sometimes came to his bed, looked at him with eyes so beautiful that it was hard not to wake, and then, sometimes, some blessed times, took him by the hand and led him into the air, through the window and away, over the tree-tops, to strange lands, or to the stars. Even if such dreams were broken they were a joy to him: when they were not broken he thought of them for days.

He had not dreamed of Ruth for years; indeed, he had seldom thought of her since his going to his prep. school; but now he dreamed of her: she was there, that heavenly spirit, calling him “Christopher,” her name for him, just as she had called him, for the first time, in that night-nursery at Tencombe, in the nook where his cot was, when he had wakened (as he thought) to see her beside him, lit by the flicker from the fire. It was such joy to see her there, after those days of friendlessness, that the tears streamed down his face. He knew that it had been hard for her to come to him, and that it was hard for her to speak; yet what use were words, she understood.

For a moment he lay still in his happiness; then, thinking that he had not seen her for years, he gazed at her, and found that she had not changed; but that he could see more in her face than in the past. She had a calmness and wisdom of beauty that was not subject to change: all peace, courage, goodness and happiness were in her face, and a hope so bright that no danger made a drawback.

All this was joy to him for a moment, until, in his dream, the thought came to him that she only appeared to him in dream; that this was a dream, and that it would fade. She smiled at his thought. “No, it is not a dream,” she said, “look about you.”

Marvelling, he sat up and put out his hand upon the soft grey-green frondage of the sari-sari. That dry, feathery touch was real: that smell of mint and turpentine from the crushed fronds was real. The red-hearts in the glow of the sun were real; so were those little green wrynecks questing their bark for food. On the ground was the broken yellow fungus, and beyond it lay the two brass rifle-shells, with ants examining them. A little gust of wind came down the forest, the sari-sari bowed to it and glistened and dappled, like the grass under the wind on Blowbury. A buck of the forest, delicate and proud, appeared, wide-eyed as a hare, noble as a Persian prince; he scraped with his forefoot and tossed his head in challenge.

“You see, it is real,” Ruth said. “Shall we go on, then? We will set out together: it is not far.”

“O God, Ruth,” he said, “I’ve wanted you. I’ve wanted you.”

She knew that, without his telling: she helped him to his feet. The light became more glorious than he had ever known it: all the leaves upon the trees seemed to be edged with fire. The light upon Ruth’s face came from the beauty of her spirit: he knew that. This other beauty was a part of the happiness which she brought.

Instantly they set out through the forest side by side, so easily that they seemed to be moving upon the wind: the boughs gave way before them: they passed the hawk in her ravine and the wild-cat in his range: the deer gazed at them, but were not startled. In a glade of grass where a brook ran Ruth stopped him, because, in the brook, was a nest full of the eggs of a waterfowl, and in the grass were little blue mitai berries, known as the berries of our Lady from being ripe near Lady Day: of these he ate and took store.

After this they came to a jut of earth on which a dead tree stood with its roots exposed. Many mice in their holes here watched him with little bright eyes. At the foot of the jut was a shrub with hard, thick, dark-green leaves, and a rough bark, seamed with fibres like veins, as fragrant as incense from creamy gum.

“Put this cream upon your face and hands,” Ruth said, “then you will not feel the bites of the insects.”

He smeared himself as he was bidden and instantly the burning in his skin was soothed. He saw Ruth gravely considering him with eyes so beautiful that he felt that he could not bear their gaze.

“Will you be always with me?” he asked.

“Always.”

“Oh,” he said, “if you would help me to save Carlotta, who is in danger and trusting to me.”

“She is in no danger,” Ruth said, “but the trumpets are calling.”

As in a dream, the words “the trumpets are calling” seemed fraught with meanings from beyond the world. He gazed at Ruth, as though by gazing he would come to a knowledge of the truth. He saw, as it were darkly, a confusion of men doing terrible things to each other while the trumpeters blew. Then all this cleared away, he beheld nothing but Carlotta in white, looking upward, with a look of happiness such as he had never seen, save on Ruth’s face. Behind her, he saw the pinnacles of a church, glittering, as he thought, from the light catching the crockets, until he saw that the glittering was from winged spirits exulting in such beauty.

“It is not as man thinks,” Ruth says, “but as God wills.”

He felt the scene merge again into a dimness, so that he could not see, only feel, that he was moving away again, with Ruth near him, over country which would have been difficult but for her presence. She led him through thorns, which he never felt and through waters where she bare him up. Once, after the endless way, he would have sunk, had she not sung to him, as once before at Tencombe, a song so beautiful that it was as though the world were singing. What happened to him in these hours he never knew, save that he was miraculously helped: in a sense, those hours were as though they had not been: in another sense, they were among the intensest hours of his life.

It was after three o’clock in the next afternoon when he came out of the wood into the plain of San Jacinto. The forest ceased, the light became stronger suddenly: then, instead of the waving gloom stabbed with glare, he saw the plain, going on into the north in rolls of freedom: he saw the homes of men and heard the lowing of cattle.

Soon he came to a road running east and west; he turned to the east along it, till, at a wayside cross, he sat down, wondering whether he could go any further: the world seemed to be swaying beneath him and in front of him.

Half an hour later, a horseman hove in sight, closely followed by a three-horsed brake full of men and women, who were singing to a mandoline and a reed-pipe, under an awning of green and white stuff. The rider saluted Hi as he passed, then, being struck by his appearance, which was that of a corpse and a scarecrow combined, pulled up and caused the brake to halt. Some of the men dismounted and asked Hi, in Spanish, what was the matter. A plump and pale young woman, with eyes like big black plums, came down to look at him. Hi heard them decide that he was English and a caballero; but, then came a discussion of the question: how had a caballero gotten into this pickle?

“Where you been?” the girl asked, in English. “In the forest?”

“Yes.”

“Lost?”

“Yes.”

“Ay de mi. For how long?”

“I don’t know.”

“Dios mio. He had been lost in the forest. Regard the mud: see also the thorn-marks and the bitings of bichos.”

“Always some are lost in the forest: they go blind, then they go mad. They will drink fire, thinking it water.”

“Remember that man of Matoche: he who had nothing but a book.”

“Also that other: the Americano: for whom some Americana must still mourn. He had her locket, the poor man.”

“And this is but a boy and a caballero.”

“Yes, and very gentle,” the girl said. “His manners are so modest.”

She turned to Hi, and spoke again in English. “You go San Marco?” she asked. “We take you to San Marco?”

“Is that near Anselmo?”

“Near where?”

“Anselmo.”

This the girl did not know: she repeated it among her friends, who all seemed puzzled. Then one man said:

“Anselmo?”

“Si,” Hi repeated. “Anselmo.”

“Si,” the man said, with a swift jabber of assent and explanation to the company. “Anselmo.” He seemed to add that it could be reached through San Marco.

“Yes,” the girl called, “you get Anselmo there.”

“I’m not very tidy for riding with you,” Hi said, shewing the wreck of his clothes, torn in forty places and mired to the throat.

“That doesn’t matter,” the girl said. “Can you climb up?”

He could not climb up; he found that he could hardly stand. The girl and one of the men helped to steady him on his feet; then the men in the brake got hold of him and heaved him in, with cries of:

“Welcome the stranger.”

“Since thou mayst be Jesus, welcome: yet if thou beest not, welcome.”

The girl, who had spoken English, made room for him beside her, and as the brake drove on, she put her arm round him and called him, “My dear.” She had been drinking a little, but she was a very good young woman.

“I talk English, my dear; I love the English: some of them, what? We had two English in our house. Mr. and Mrs. Watson; do you know them? To-day, we been to a wedding.”

Here one of the musicians handed her a wicker-covered blue glass liqueur-bottle with a tin measure which could be screwed over the stopper.

“Isn’t Paco dreadful?” she said. “First we had wine: then we had brandy: now he’s going to give us all the Milk of Venus. We shall all be drunk, Paco.”

“No, no, not for you,” Paco said. “But for the Englishman.” They gave Hi a swig of the Milk of Venus, which revived him wonderfully: then they took swigs of it themselves till it was all gone: then they threw the bottle at Uncle Philip (as they called the rider), hit his horse on the crupper and made him buck. The plump young woman was very kind; she put her arm a good deal more tightly round Hi and said that she did love stars.

“You know, stars in the evening: they’re so like angels.”

Hi said that she was like an angel.

“A bit fallen angel; I don’t think: what?” she said.

A man with a mahogany-coloured face, “rather like a frog,” Hi thought, since his eyes turned up and his face was all going to throat, began to sing a doleful ballad, with a chorus in which all joined. As all felt better after this, one of the other men sang a song which went with great spirit, though it made the ladies blush. As he was pleased with its reception, he sang all the blushing parts of it a second time. Then the frog man produced a bag from under the seat: it contained three small bottles with brightly coloured labels showing ladies of a free disposition. The labels were printed with the words: “Smiles of the Muses.” There was much applause in the brake when they appeared.

“Ha. Smiles of the Muses. Three bottles.”

“Ha, the good Hernando, who knows what is good.”

“Always the good Smiles of the Muses, to drive away care and settle what went before.”

The brake pulled up by the wayside, so that no Smile might be spilled. The good Hernando dispensed something like a quarter of a bottle to each of the company. It was a syrup or cordial, about as thick as olive oil. It smelt, when opened, of all the flowers of heaven. At a first taste it reminded one of strawberries and of honey: then it warmed the throat: then, as it trickled along, it made a feeling glow all the way down.

When the brake drove on again, the mandoline struck up a Smile of the Muse: the reed-pipe piped to it and the company sang. The song had not much body to it, being indeed a catch about the eyes of a lady being as lovely as stars. It went on, during some miles of the way, till in the dusk of the evening the brake halted in San Marco, which was a town of six farms and a chapel.

Here, as weary as Hi was, he noticed that something had happened: someone had come in with news which brought all the town out of doors. When the news reached the wedding party, it changed their tone. The younger men hurried off to the group about the messenger, who stood on the chapel steps answering questions. The frog-faced man, the good Hernando, helped Hi down from the brake. Uncle Philip and the girl urged him to enter a lime-washed farm-house, with a smell of wine-press about it near which the brake had stopped. Hi was so dizzy with fatigue that he hardly knew what he was doing, yet he shrank from bringing his filthy state into a clean home.

“You come to the harness-room,” Uncle Philip said, through the girl, “for a bath, and to get out the thorns and jiggers.”

They brought him a half-cask and hot water: after his bathe they gave him a clean cotton sleeping suit and a bed with Christian sheets. They brought broth to him, when he was in bed, but he was asleep before it came: he slept for fifteen hours.

In the afternoon of the next day, when he woke, he found his clothes washed and mended. Uncle Philip and the girl brought him a coat, a sombrero and a pair of new shoes, which they pressed him to accept with a grace and sweetness of welcome which moved him almost to tears. “Guests come from God,” they said.

“Hosts, too,” he thought.

“If I ever can,” he said, “I will bring these things back: be sure. I can never, never thank you enough.”

When he had dressed, he came to the girl.

“What has happened?” he asked. “I’ve been lost for a week. What has happened in the country?”

“There is war,” she said.

“In Santa Barbara city?”

“We do not hear of the city, save once in the week, when the ore-train returns with the empty trucks. No; but one from the west came here yesterday to call us to war. There are thousands, he said, marching to Santa Barbara.”

“What for?”

“For our religion, so he said.”

“Is that Don Manuel?” Hi asked. “Is it Don Manuel’s army that is marching?”

“I do not know. It will be some army.”

“Where it is?” Hi asked. “Do you happen to know where it is?”

“It was near here, within a short ride, yesterday,” she said, “going to Anselmo, the place you asked about.”

“That is it,” he said. “If the army comes from the west and is marching east it must be Don Manuel’s army, going to save Carlotta. Is it a White army?”

“Yes.”

“Thank heaven,” he said, “Ezekiel Rust got through. You do not know, do you, whether the Reds have harmed one Señorita de Leyva?”

“No.”

“I suppose all the people here have gone to the army?”

“No,” the girl said. “One or two have gone.”

“Aren’t you Whites here? Are you Reds?”

“We have the work to do: it is the people in cities who have these quarrels.”

“But in this quarrel,” he said, “surely everyone must join.”

“The work has to be done. If these city people worked, they would not have the time to quarrel.”

“Oh, wouldn’t they,” he said, “that’s all you know of men. But, look here, how can I get to Anselmo?”

“You are not going to fight?”

“I’ve been trusted with a message to Don Manuel. If he is to be at Anselmo, I must try to get there to meet him. You’re sure it is Anselmo?”

“The men from here went there last night.”

“And how can I get there?”

“The ore-train to Piedras Blancas, going to-night,” she said, “would take you to within ten miles of it, so Hernando says.”

“Could I go in that?”

“Uncle Philip will speak to the engine driver.”

“Oh, thank you. At what time would the train reach the place within ten miles of Anselmo?”

“Who knows, with a thing so dangerous as a train? Perhaps at midnight: perhaps at dawn. Sometimes it is two days.”

“Good heaven. Is the engine-driver likely to refuse to take me?”

“Hernando says that soldiers were searching the line yesterday.”

“What soldiers?”

“Red soldiers: State soldiers from Meruel. They were looking to see if the Whites were coming by train.”

“Has there been any battle yet?”

“We have heard of none. They expected none till they are close to the city.”

“Thank heaven,” Hi said, “perhaps I shall be with them in time, after all. And, oh, will you ask your Uncle Philip to beseech the engine-driver to take me? Say it’s very, very important: for a woman’s life may depend on it.”

“He ask all right.”

“Suppose he refuse,” Hi said.

“He not refuse, unless he got soldiers with him. But Hernando says they may explode the line to stop the soldiers.”

However, at eight that evening, when the engine-driver took Hi as a passenger, the line had not been exploded and no news had come of a battle. The engine-driver was a Scot from Lanark, who had seen a detachment of the Western army away in the west two days before. “They came to the siding at Zamorra,” he said, “to lift the oats stored there for the teams. Their captain was with them, a very big man, fierce-looking, with fine hands. What’s this, they call him? Manuel.”

“Yes, Manuel.”

“The damned marauding son of a gun will get his neck in a noose before he’s much older.”

“Will he?” Hi asked. “He has the right on his side.”

“Be damned to the right on his side. He’s setting up a civil war here, because he don’t like the laws of the opposition. Yon’s a damned precedent. However, he’ll be soon hanged and his moss-troopers the same. Now get in, lad, to your nest: she’s starting.”

Hi leaned out to shake hands with the girl, Uncle Philip and Hernando, who had come to see him off. He thanked them again and again.

“If you come these way again,” the girl said, “you look us up, what?”

“That indeed I will do,” Hi said. “And I wish I could thank you or repay you.”

The train’s jerk at starting flung him from his farewells into his nest among the ore, where he passed this the last night of his journey to fetch Don Manuel.

XVIII

Shortly before dawn the next morning the train stopped at the quarry-siding of Piedras Blancas, where the cooks of a squadron of Meruel Reds were preparing broth and maté with water from the railway tanks.

“There you are, lad,” the driver said, as he bade Hi good-bye. “Here’s a wheen good law-and-order men to give yon marauding Manuel his paiks. More power to ye, sons,” he cried, raising his voice. “And hang yon idolatrous Deeck Turpin on a sour apple-tree.”

On leaving the train, Hi slipped through the crowd of quarry men and soldiers, out of the siding to the road. Men and horses were coming from their billets in the village. The cliff of the quarry loomed out white: the stone dust made the village like moonlight or a flour mill.

Turning rapidly away downhill, he came to a grassy bank, where he breakfasted on food which the girl had provided. As he ate, all that expanse of the plain came into light and colour from the morning: he could see.

There, far away, was Santa Barbara, glittering under a smudge of mist, which hung over the violet of the sea. There, less than half way to the city, was the hill to which he had been struggling all these days. That heave of hill, topped by the church tower, one pinnacle of which was a statue of Our Lady, was the hill of Anselmo, distant. . . . He could not say how far distant it was, in that deceptive light: “Ten miles,” they had said, but it might well be fifteen. “Oh, for a telescope or a pair of glasses,” he said, “then I could see if the White army is there. That is where it must be.”

As he turned towards Anselmo, he heard the sergeants of the Meruel Reds calling the roll at the siding.

“Those fellows are here for no good,” he thought. “I’ll get along to Don Manuel before I am stopped.”

The sun strode up out of the sea to give to the country a beauty, unspeakable to one who had been for a week in the gloom of the forest. To the joy of the light was added a beauty of overwhelming blossom, so great that the soul of the earth seemed to be exulting in the sun.

“I shall reach Don Manuel after all,” he said. “I shall be actually with him when we save Carlotta from the prison. And, oh, thank God, after all, I have helped a little, for Rust has gotten through.”

After an hour and a half of walking, he was so far down into the plain that Anselmo was almost merged in the tree clumps at its base. It seemed to be less than two miles to the tower. The track led through clumps of ilex into groves of timber, among which a brook ran. As he passed into the cover of the ilex, he looked back at the land from which he had come, at the foothills like an advanced guard and the mountains like an army of kings. On the track by which he had come, he saw horsemen coming in twos at a rather quick trot. “There are those soldiers who were at the station,” he thought. “They are coming this way, too. Can they be coming to join Don Manuel?”

Why should they not be? They were State troops, but in civil wars, troops sometimes pass from the State to its rebels. “They can’t be coming to attack him, anyway,” he thought, “for there aren’t a hundred of them, and Don Manuel has thousands, so they said. If Don Manuel be in the village there, they’ll meet their match.”

It came into his mind that if these men were coming to attack, or if Don Manuel, being at Anselmo, came out to attack them, his own position, between the two forces, would be perilous. He therefore hurried through the cover, and pastures beyond to a copse of Turkey-oak which hid all sight of Anselmo hill. As he went, he listened for some sound of Don Manuel’s army, the noise of many hoofs, the call of bugles, the shouting of orders, or even a shot from a picket. As he heard no such sounds he concluded that the army was not there. “Perhaps it has gone on to Santa Barbara,” he thought. “I may be just too late for it, through sleeping too long yesterday.”

Then he thought, “It is more likely that they are all in Anselmo town on the other side of the hill. And more likely still that they haven’t yet reached Anselmo. They’ve been coming a long way on very bad going; they’re bound to have crocked a lot of horses. That’s it, no doubt. I’ve got here before them. In which case, good Lord, those Reds behind me will probably take me prisoner. I’d better hide in this copse till they’ve gone on or shown their hand.”

He had not gone far into the copse of Turkey-oak, when he suddenly found that the further half of the copse was full of soldiers. His first thought was, “Here are the Whites,” but a clearer view showed him that they wore dusty reddish Meruel uniforms such as he had seen at the station at dawn.

“Meruel Reds,” he thought, “I wish I knew which side they are on.”

To hesitate would have looked suspicious: he walked boldly on.

“I shall jolly soon know which side they’re on,” he thought. “They’re Reds. I’ll bet my burial money.”

Those whom he saw were single mounted troopers, each holding three unmounted horses. All were craned forward on their horses’ necks intently watching something that was being done outside the copse towards Anselmo. Beyond these horseholders, some dismounted troopers with carbines at the ready were at the edge of the copse, also intently watching. Two officers who were there staring at Anselmo through glasses, caught sight of Hi. One of them challenged in Spanish and at once moved up to him, to ask who he was, and what he wanted there.

“I am English,” Hi answered, “I am going to Anselmo.”

“What for?” the officer asked, in good English.

“To see George Elena?”

“Who is he?”

“A horse-breeder.”

“What about?”

“To borrow a horse to get back to Santa Barbara.”

“Where do you come from?”

“I’ve been lost in the forest.”

“How?”

“Well, I lost my way.”

“Oh, you lost your way, did you,” the officer said, becoming somewhat harder in his manner. “Why do you wear that coat and hat? you are not a native here. Why are you disguised?”

“My own clothes were ruined in the forest as you can see,” Hi said. “Some kind people at San Marco, where I came out of the forest, gave me these to make up.”

The other officer moved over to them, to ask what his brother had asked.

“So, a sacred pekin,” he said. They talked in Spanish for a moment, with looks at Hi which were not favourable.

“Zubiga,” the elder officer called, to a couple of orderlies, who jumped forward at the order, “Take this man in charge.” Then turning to Hi, he said, “You will stand aside a little. We will see later.”

“Mayn’t I go on to Anselmo?”

“No: sacred pekin, you mayn’t.”

They left him with the orderlies, while they returned towards the edge of the copse to watch what their scouts were doing. “They are sending out spies,” Hi thought. “I’ve come just too late. Don Manuel is up the hill in Anselmo, and if I’d only been here an hour sooner, I’d have joined him before these devils arrived. Now I’m diddled again.”

After some minutes of suspense, the squadron from Piedras Blancas entered the copse. The officer in charge of it took the salute of the two officers who had stopped Hi; he spoke to them both, went to the edge of the copse, to watch what was being done, talked for a few minutes there, and then came to Hi. He was an elderly man, with a frank, fearless face, and the pug-nosed look of a lightweight boxer.

Like all the officers of the army he spoke English.

“When were you last in Anselmo?” he asked.

“I have never been there.”

“Never; yet you know people there. Do you speak Spanish?”

“No: unfortunately. I’ve only been about a fortnight in this country.”

“Where were you last night?”

“In the ore-train coming from San Marco to Piedras Blancas.”

“Where were you yesterday?”

“At San Marco.”

“Did you see or hear anything of a rebel army at San Marco?”

“No.”

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“What are you doing in this country? How did you come here?”

Hi told him as much as he thought sufficient: it did not ring quite true. The officer seemed puzzled.

“Were you in Piedras Blancas this morning?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You saw these troops?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see troops yesterday?”

“No.”

“Yet you saw these this morning, you say?”

“Yes.”

“And at once decided that you would bring the news of what you had seen to Anselmo?”

“Not at all,” Hi said. “I’m not a spy. I happen to know that the Elenas in Anselmo have horses, and as they know friends of mine in Santa Barbara I hoped to borrow a horse to ride home on.”

The officer frowned.

“There’s something not quite right, somewhere,” he said, “I don’t see what brings you here. What friends have you in Santa Barbara?”

“Mr. Winter of Quezon. Mr. Weycock of the Sugar Company knows me.”

“English people?”

“Yes.”

“All right,” the officer said. “Stand easy.”

He stood easy for a few seconds, considering, then he returned to Hi.

“You say you were taken to Ribote and then lost your way in the forest? What were you doing when you were taken to Ribote?”

“Going to Anselmo.”

“What for?”

“To see the Elenas’ horses.”

“You say this was ten days ago?”

“Yes.”

“Why should you see the Elenas’ horses?”

“My father is a horse-breeder in England.”

“If you’re lying,” the officer said, “it may be a very serious matter for you.”

“I am not lying,” Hi said: he hoped that he wasn’t. A couple of scouts rode in to the copse to report: the officer left Hi to examine them: he went with them to the copse-edge while they explained something. Hi could see them gesticulating, while the officer tried to get at the truth. After a minute’s thought, he called the other officers, explained the situation to them, and gave the order to mount. Seeing Hi, he called to the orderly in Spanish to bring the boy with him. “Mount him on a spare horse,” he said.

“Sir,” Hi called out. “Will you not let me go on to Anselmo?”

“No, sacred pekin,” the pekin officer answered. “And make less noise.”

When the squadron had mounted, with Hi in their midst on a spare horse, the files moved away out of the copse into the open. They moved across a scrubby pasture in a direction parallel with Anselmo hill. Flankers rode out to their left, and all eyes were turned to the left, not to Anselmo, but to a roll of rising ground beyond it. “That is where Don Manuel is, then,” Hi thought.

As they drew clear of the trees, Hi had for a moment a good view of Anselmo. It was like one of the little hill cities which he had seen in Italy, except that it was smaller than any, and stood upon a smaller hill. A clump of trees grew on the hillside so as to hide most of the wall with gray-green leaves. From the edge of the wood the white church tower rose, topped by its statue.

When this was about a mile behind them, the troops came over the roll of ground into sight of the plain stretching on into the west. There, rather more than a mile away, was a big white estancia with a haras or horse-breeding stable beside it, below three conspicuous windmill pumps. About half a mile beyond this, moving slowly towards Santa Barbara, was a large body of mounted men, with flankers thrown out on both sides, and many spare horses.

“There they are,” everybody said at once. “There it is,” Hi said to himself. “That is Don Manuel’s army, or a part of it; and that big breeding stable is the Elenas’ place, where I ought to have been ten days ago.

“And now,” he thought, with a quickening pulse, “I shall probable see a battle; and these hundred odd Reds will get licked as they deserve.”

However, the officer of his party had no intention of engaging. He hung to the rear of the moving army for rather more than a mile: then, at a crossing of tracks, he turned away directly to Santa Barbara and gave the order to trot. It was perhaps ten in the morning when they left the cross roads: it must have been mid-day when they halted at the Inn of the Little Foxes, where a trooper, bearing a red pennon, stood at the door: the inn being a headquarters of some kind.

The commander went into the inn to report and to ask for orders. He was gone for a quarter of an hour, during which a shot was fired a mile or two to the west. It was followed by several shots, of different qualities, answering each other. After this, though the firing often almost ceased, and sometimes sounded from further away, it never quite ceased and on the whole drew nearer. It was all independent firing.

It reminded Hi of the sounds of pheasant shooting at home in the unpreserved downland coverts where birds are scarce.

When the commander came out, another officer was with him. This one seemed to be a general, preparing to ride. He was flicking his spotless boots with a silk handkerchief, and walking with an arch of the legs caused partly by tight breeches, partly by affectation. “Where is this English fellow?” he called.

“There, sir,” the commander said. “Bring him up, you.” Hi was led forward.

“I believe, boy, that you are a spy,” the general said. “I’ve a good mind to shoot you. Most soldiers in my place would shoot you. As it happens, my orders are not to shoot aliens, but to send them in for trial; which I shall do. You will go in to Santa Barbara till your case can be sifted a little. Any misfortune which happens to you you will have brought upon yourself.” He called in Spanish to some troopers to take Hi to the waggons which were about to start under escort to the city. He also gave them a few written words about Hi’s case for the escort commander. As Hi now knew what answer any officer would give to him, if he replied, he held his peace. The troopers gave him into the charge of the escort of the waggon, who told him, in English, to get into a waggon. When Hi asked which waggon, for there were half a dozen tilted army waggons all of one pattern, the man told him that he did not care which waggon, but that if he did not get into one straightaway he would break his face. “Get into that one there,” he cried, “and don’t show your face outside the tilt or you’ll get a butt in the lip.”

“You can’t come in here,” an Englishman, inside the waggon said, “this one is full up.”

“What are you waiting for?” the escort called. “Get in.”

“It is full up,” Hi said.

“Full up,” the man replied. “Who says it’s full up? You sacred suspects should all be shot if I’d my way. I’ll see if you’re full up. Get in. Make way for him, you. Now get in.” With a cudgel which he carried he poked the suspects till they made room; then Hi was thrust in among them.

The waggon was full. It contained an Englishman with a Spanish wife and three little children; an elderly American in the pineapple trade; an imbecile of doubtful nationality who dribbled at the mouth and gurgled in the throat; a strong young native woman in hysterics; an old woman who was drunk; her grandson, who had eaten something which had disagreed with him; three native men, one of them very old and infirm, the second shot in the body, unconscious and plainly near death, the third in a dreadful condition with fever. On the top of the discomforts of Hi’s entrance, the waggons started.

“Why couldn’t you have gone to one of the other waggons?” the Englishman said. “You could have seen that this was full, one would have thought.”

“I had to do what I was told,” Hi said. “It’s not my fault.”

“At least you can give a lady room,” the man replied, “you can see that there’s a lady here in an interesting condition.”

“I am sorry,” Hi said, moving as far as he could, “I did not see.”

“Any man of decent feeling would stand up,” the man said. “But perhaps you don’t come from the fobug St. German.”

“Where is that?”

“Oh, perhaps you don’t understand Latin; it’s where manners is.”

“Well, I wish we were there,” Hi said.

“That touched you where you live,” the American said. “This kid ain’t to blame for coming here. Though I’ll roast this gol-derned Government for putting him.”

“Ay, ay, ay, de mi,” the young woman called, as she rose to a sitting posture and clawed with both hands in the faces beside her.

“Come off with all that, Angelita,” the American said. “You, mister, catch a holt of that hand and I’ll catch a holt of this; then she won’t do us an injury.” Hi caught one of the arms of the young woman as he was bid, but she was strong in the arm and writhing all ways at once. “Gee,” the American said, “this young woman will ask her husband how about it when he comes home from his Lodge; she won’t wait till day dawns.”

As Hi hove down the arm of the young woman, the imbecile began to coo at him, with symptoms of affection. Presently the Englishman, who was a tall, thin, hatchet-faced man, with little moustaches waxed at the ends, said: “That captain-man ought to be shot for sending a lady in such a state in a waggon like this. I have been here five years and this is my reward. My wife now is going to be sick. It is the fresh air beating upon her, in her present state.”

The old woman, who was drunk, here shoved her grandson to the tail-board of the waggon; the fresh air seemed to have beaten upon him.

“This is a nice way to send a lady to the city,” the Englishman said. “That boy ought to be ashamed of himself. As for that captain-man, I shall complain to the Government. It is a marvel that she doesn’t miscarry.”

“She’ll run a darned good chance of that,” the American said. “The Whites will be here this afternoon. There’ll be fighting in the streets to-night. So if you know a good snug cellar in a back street, get to it, pronto.”

Here the three children of the Englishman began to cry; their mother, who was a big woman with a white fat face and jowl, boxed their ears for crying. The drunken woman, having soothed her grandson a little, drank from a bottle; then, rising from the floor to her feet, tried to dance, lifting her skirts to her knee. All this time the waggon was swaying forward at a good pace on a rough road; the children were weeping, the Englishman was growling, the young woman was writhing and hysterical, the old man was motionless, the dying man gasping for air, and the man with the fever was shivering. Hi and the American were trying to keep the girl in one place. The imbecile, who had decided that he liked Hi, kept pressing close to him and patting the back of his neck. Hi, who had no free hand, kept warding him off with his elbow; but the creature, perhaps mistaking this for a return of affection, pressed back, cooing.

The girl suddenly shook herself free and shrieked at the top of her voice. She did not know what she was doing; all her young muscular body was out of control. Hi remembered tales in the Bible of people who “had a devil”; this young woman had a devil, or the devil had her. “Look out, kid,” the American called, “she’s into the hay-lot, your side.”

“Come back,” Hi called. “Be quiet, señorita; it’s all right. We’re all friends here.”

“Friends,” the American said, “I guess we are. It’s these darned Santa Barbarians who are the enemies in this land. They’ll knock my apple season galley west. Lie still, Angelita, lie still.”

“It’s all these hidalgos,” the Englishman said. “They cause the trouble in this land. What this land wants is to be opened up to free competition and progress. It wants white men. These priests and these hidalgos are fallacies; they ought to have been exploded long ago. If the English Government doesn’t step in, it ought to be made to. My wife is a Pinamente; one of the oldest families, if we had our rights; and here these soldiers, these fine jacks-in-office, send her in a waggon like this.”

“I feel for her,” the American said, “being of a darned old family myself.”

At this moment, above the noise of the waggons, as they bumped and lurched along, there came the whine and beat of barbaric music. The waggons drew to the side of the track, while the music grew louder and went by. Some hundreds of horses in twos went by, with a scuffling up of dust and the stink of sweat, horses and hot leather.

“Pitubas moving out,” the American said. “I told you the Whites are coming. They’ll fight this day and the Whites’ll whip.”

“How do you know?” the Englishman asked.

“Because I’ve been in the fighting business; had three years of it, and I know fighters when I see them. Man for man, the Whites will put rings round these yellow devils.”

“You lie,” the old drunken woman said suddenly, in very good English, blinking like an owl. “Damn your soul, you lie.” She blinked, but said no more; as it happened, it was all the English she knew. The waggon halted by the side of the track as other music drew nearer.

“Their darned national anthem,” the American said, beginning to sing to the tune.

We will rally to the banner of our fathers, In the land that we lo—o—o—ove so well; We will rally to the banner of our fathers, In the land where our lo—o—oved ones dwell. Red the blood that we shed for our faith, Red the flag that we cherish to the death, Red our hope for our enemies’ confusion In the land that we lo—o—ove so well.

“Perro de Rojo,” the old woman screamed. “Abajo, perro de Rojo,” she leaped up to a kneeling posture and spat in the American’s face.

“Now, now, momma,” he said, “That don’t go. You didn’t ought to spit at people, even when you’ve bit ’em and hate the taste.”

She snarled at him like a wild beast; then, seeing foot soldiers marching by in the dust stirred up by the Pitubas’ horses, she wrestled her way to the tail-board of the waggon, from which she cursed them for being Red.

“Come back into the waggon, mother,” the American said. “Gee, kid, catch a holt of mommer. These Reds will shoot her if she don’t let up.” An officer who was passing struck her with the flat of his sword in the face: “Keep in,” he said. “And you, driver, get on with you into the city.”

The waggon moved on slowly after that. Troops were passing, horse, foot and a few guns, with waggons and gear. They were in the suburbs by this time, among houses, in a stream of people who were setting into the city, carrying whatever they could from their homes in the threat of war. At the gate, there was delay and confusion; the waggon was jammed in the crowd, waiting its turn to pass. When they came through the gate, a big mulatto, with a bright green ostrich plume in his hat, looked under the tilt at them, and said, “Suspecteds. Take all Suspecteds to the Church of the Sanctity of Lopez, once called by the slaves of superstition Trinity.”

They had not far to go to this church. They passed a public square used as a camp for refugees, then they entered what seemed like a city of the dead, where none stirred out from the shuttered houses. As the guards herded them into the church once called the Trinity, Hi heard the distant fire of rifles, popping more constantly from the region through which he had passed.

“Skirmishers’ independent fire,” the American said. “If it comes nearer, it’s a sign the Whites have whipped; if it dies down, it’s a sign the Whites are whipped. Say,” he continued, to one of the Red officers at the church-door, “we here are American and English citizens. Don’t you think to gaol us, but send us to our Consuls.” He repeated this pointedly in Spanish. “We’re not going to stand for being gaoled,” he said.

“This is no gaol,” the officer explained, “but a shelter till affairs are resolved. Whom do you wish to see?”

“The American Consul.”

“And you?”

“The English Consul,” the Englishman said.

“And you?”

“I want to go to my hotel, the Santiago,” Hi said.

“It is closed.”

“Then to the English Club.”

“That, too, is closed.”

“Then the English Consul.”

The officer made notes in pencil upon a piece of paper. “Word will be sent at once to your Consuls,” he said. “Now enter.”

“I’ll be darned if I enter,” the American said.

Half a dozen troopers flung him violently into the church; Hi and the Englishman were flung in on top of him, and the doors were closed and locked upon them. Two English-speaking guards in the pulpit called out to them to be quiet.

“But we insist on seeing our Consuls.”

“Consuls sent for,” the men said. “Hold your rows.”

“I’ll bet the Consuls aren’t sent for,” the American said. “I know my darned Barbarians by this time.”

XIX

It was about half-past one in the afternoon when the church doors closed: the sound of the rifle fire continued, in an irregular popping as though the people some miles away were letting off fire crackers.

“That’s not fighting,” the American said, “that’s still only skirmishing. These darned people can neither make war nor keep peace.”

The church was of a Renaissance model, with rounded windows high up in the walls, and a ceiling painted with simpering ladies in clothes like rolls of blue smoke. All the sacred symbols had been wrenched or cut away from the decorations. A big coloured print of Don Lopez stood in a gilt frame over the altar. It represented him in evening dress with a red sash across his shirt. It had a dreadful likeness to a pig whose throat had been cut. Under him in gilt letters was the legend:

Liberty from Superstition.

There were about a hundred men, women and children of the suspected imprisoned there: most of them were stunned, some were terrified: one or two, like the young girl, hysterical. What shocked Hi was the atmosphere of suspicion: all there were afraid that the next person was a spy. They looked at each other, but hardly spoke, hardly even whispered. They watched the shot man die and the fevered man shake, without interest and without help: I was I, he was he; self was become terribly important, and sympathy a dangerous thing.

“They’ve been through the mill, these people,” the American said.

“How do you know the Whites will be here this afternoon?” Hi asked him.

“Cut it right out, son,” the American said. “I’ve been through one of these picnics once before here. This place is plum full of spies. You’d best not talk.”

“But do you know if the Reds have killed anyone here?”

“Killed? I dunno. I guess they won’t kill till they see which way the weasel pops. If they whip, they’ll rip around. But you stay quiet.”

The advice was good, for even as they talked a man edged a little nearer to them, with the look of the eavesdropper. When he found that the two fell silent, he sidled up to Hi, indicated the portrait over the altar, and said: “Look at that. I call that a dam’ outrage: don’t you?” Something in the look of the man reminded Hi of the brothel-touts who had beset him at the landing stairs before ’Zeke drove them away: it flashed into his mind that this man might be a spy: so he answered, “No, I call it ‘Liberty from Superstition.’” The man was puzzled by the answer, but seemed to consider Hi’s youth, and then moved away.

Soon after this, an armed guard appeared at the door, under an officer, who explained that the married couples as well as all women and children there in prison were to be moved “in the interests of morality” to another church, where they would be alone. As some of them expected to be murdered outside the doors, this caused a piteous scene, of screaming and begging for mercy, but by persuasion and force the removal was made. Among those removed, to Hi’s great relief, was the Englishman with the Spanish wife, the pride of the Pinamentes, and their three children.

While the doors were open, some sweepers from the barracks brought in a cask of water and a basket of army bread for the use of the prisoners for which those with any appetites left were glad and thankful.

The American tried to find out from these sweepers what was happening outside. They would not answer him except by shaking their heads: when the guards noticed the questioning they ordered the prisoners not to speak to the sweepers on pain of being shot. “These Red Runts are plum scared,” the American said. “They wouldn’t bring us food unless they were afraid of being whipped. They’re keeping both sides the fence.”

Hi was cheered by this, as by nothing else. After three minutes in the church, he had felt that he knew and loathed every detail of it. He tried walking up and down the aisles; but the sense, that he was a prisoner, took all the interest out of walking. He tried lying down to sleep, but the sense that he was a prisoner, the knowledge that he had failed, and the excitement of the coming battle, kept him awake. He tried to pray that the Whites would rout the Reds; but the excitement and anxiety were too great, he could not put the prayer into words. Time seemed to stand still, all reality seemed to have ceased; he lay in a horrible nothing, anxious unspeakably. Everybody there in the church was in the same state. When Hi listened, he felt that everybody in the city was in the same state. One of the strange things of that afternoon was the silence in the town about them; it seemed like a town of the dead, save for the pacing of the guards outside the doors, and the occasional passing of patrols. At about half-past three, the distant firing, which had hardly varied in volume for two hours, increased and changed. Plainly some much heavier metal had come into action.

“Two batteries of four guns,” the American said, after listening. “Number three gun in one of ’em is slow in getting off. They’ve only four batteries in their whole army: and one of them’s in pawn, for the Dictator’s new state coach.”

“The firing is nearer than it was,” Hi said.

“There’s more of it,” the American said.

There was more of it for half an hour: then suddenly it increased to a rolling, rattling racket much nearer at hand. This went on with the utmost fury for twenty minutes, during which all the windows in Santa Barbara rattled and trembled. Hi could hear shouting in the noise of the firing: then the shouting ceased and the firing dwindled away to a popping till it almost ceased, too. He looked to the American for an explanation. “That was an attack,” he said. “But I guess they’ve grown tired of it.”

It seemed as though that were the case, that they were tired of it. The light began to move from the floor up the wall as the sun went down the sky. The day of battle and suspense seemed coming to an end. Then suddenly, within a quarter of a mile of them, seemingly somewhere on the sea-front of the city, there came a clattering of horse-hoofs and shouting.

After this, there was silence, while everybody waited in suspense for a quarter of an hour, when a sudden shattering volley from close at hand sent the hearts into the throats. Ricochetting bullets struck the near-by roofs, there were falls of plaster and of tiles and the cries of women, while the space down by the sea-front began to roar with firing: hot and hot, so near at hand that presently the stink of the powder drifted into the church.

The firing went on for nearly an hour, dwindling as the light dwindled, till by the time the church was dark, save for the moonlight, it ceased altogether.

“The Whites must have entered the town and won,” Hi said to the American. “That firing was in the town.”

“It was in the town all right,” the American said.

Hi rose from his seat and began to pace up and down in his excitement. The thought of Carlotta being set free was more than he could bear. The guards lit a couple of candles in a side chapel, peered to see who was walking, and called to Hi to keep still. The town outside was deathly still for some time after the firing had ceased: then all the streets began to ring with the trotting of horses, coming into the city from the direction of the Medinas Gate. They came in at a fast trot on at least three roads, so that the clatter and clink filled the air.

“Here the conquering heroes come,” the Americans said.

“The Whites?”

“It’s the side that’s won anyway, or they wouldn’t come in in order.”

“All the White army is cavalry.”

“Our darned Consuls might get a wiggle on without slopping over into speed.”

“I don’t suppose they know we’re here.”

“It’s their job to know we’re not here.”

The cavalry, whoever they were, went to their stations or bivouacs and ceased to clatter. The town lapsed again into silence. Presently, in the quiet, within a hundred yards of the church, a sentry challenged someone, waited for two seconds, and fired. Someone cried out and fell, while the sentry jerked out the shell, which tinkled on the stones, reloaded and snapped-to the breech.

“The sentry’s night to howl,” the American said.

Soon after this, when the town was silent save for the pacing of the feet of sentries here and there, and the occasional slow passing of horse patrols, some volley-firings, of three or four rifles together, began in the direction of the cathedral. These volleys were repeated at short intervals for twenty minutes.

“What is that sort of firing?” Hi asked.

“It can only be executions,” the American said. “They’re shooting people.”

“Deserters?”

“Yes; or prisoners.”

“Prisoners of war? Surely not?”

“Any gol-darned prisoner’s good enough to shoot in this gol-darned Republic.”

“Then it means that the Whites have won?”

“Well, it would seem so.”

“I hope to God they have.”

“Well, kid, don’t hope it publicly till you know it’s a fact.”

“Don’t you think that the Whites have won?” Hi asked in a whisper.

“We’ll know soon enough.”

* * * * * * *

At about ten o’clock, when most of those in the church had begun to think that nothing more would happen that night, a strong guard marched into the little plaza outside the church and halted there. Hi suddenly saw a great increase in the light outside, for the newcomers had lit flares there. The doors of the church were opened and a strong squad of armed guards entered. A prim-lipped man, with the look of a “spoiled priest,” who seemed to be in charge of the guard, gave orders that the altar should be brought from a side chapel, and placed as a table near the door. When the altar had been placed, and its candles lighted, he seated himself upon a chair there, asked for the register of the prisoners, and began to read it through. From time to time he looked into the body of the church, where he could see hardly anything, but a few white faces, the twinkle of the two candles in the nave and the glistening of some of the gilding. Hi heard two or three of the prisoners near him praying beneath their breath with the intensity of terror. He watched the prim-lipped man just as his rabbit had watched the snake. The man seemed to be waiting for some one who did not come. Beyond him, Hi could see the dip at the church steps, a market-flare burning, and moving shadows. The prim-lipped man marked his register with a pencil.

“Say, sport,” the American said, stepping up to him, “we ain’t your nationals. We demand our release or our Consuls.”

All the other English-speaking people there, eight in all, joined in, in this appeal. The prim-lipped man listened to them all with courtesy, then he said, in English, with an Irish accent:

“In the very unsettled state of the city, you are safer here than you could be elsewhere.”

“That may be or may not be, but I guess our countries are pretty well able to protect us. We are unlawfully detained here. We’ve been here pretty well all day. We’ve protested, and demanded our Consuls. What are you going to do about it?”

The prim-lipped man listened again. “You will understand,” he said at last, “that I am not responsible in any way for anything that may have happened to you in these disorders, nor for your being here now. I am sincerely sorry that you should have been inconvenienced. I must ask you to blame the time, and those guilty for the time, not the Republic. In a few minutes, the commandant of this ward will be here, when I promise you that your cases shall be heard. In the meantime, let me see each one of you, who claim not to be of our nation.”

The eight came forward to the table in a body, and explained in turn who and what they were. The prim-lipped man accepted each claim. “You will understand,” he said, “that in these disorders we have to use every care to protect those domiciled among us. As the disorders are now over, I do not think that you will be inconvenienced beyond to-day.”

“Will you tell us, sir,” Hi asked, “what exactly has happened here?” The American’s hand pressed Hi’s arm.

“Happened?” the prim-lipped man said. “Order has been restored, or is fast being restored. The Republic has been saved.” He looked at the papers, to see what Hi was charged with, then dismissed the eight to one side.

“Is this man a White?” Hi wondered. “Are those guards White? They wear no white upon their uniforms, but neither do they wear any red. Supposing Don Manuel were suddenly to appear with the commandant: oh, that would be joy.”

Almost immediately after this a carriage drove to the steps of the church and halted there. Hi heard the guards called to attention and ordered to salute. The prim-lipped man turned to them.

“This is the commandant,” he said.

Some footsteps sounded upon the church steps, one of the feet clinked with spurs. Hi craned forward to see who entered, feeling sure that Don Manuel would be among the party: something within him told him that he was there, coming victorious to set his servants free. “Oh, Don Manuel,” he thought, “if it is only you, I don’t think I’ll care what happens to me for ever after.”

Three people entered together into the light of the altar candles. The truth came upon Hi with a stunning of heart and head: these people were Reds, the Reds had won.

The three who entered were:—a big, flashy, free moving, swaggering type of cavalryman, wearing a scarlet sash across his uniform: the big negro with the green feather, whom Hi had seen taking the Piranhas’ horses; and a woman, who also wore a scarlet sash across her shoulder.

“Gee, kid, there’s the were-wolf,” the American whispered to Hi. “Now there’ll be blood.”

“Who is she?”

“Anna, the were-wolf: an anti-cleric: been fighting the church all her life. She’s a Red from Medinas.”

“Then the Reds have won?”

“You bet your sweet life.”

The woman and the soldier seated themselves at the table with the prim-lipped man; the cavalryman asked some questions, the prim-lipped man seemed to be explaining about the foreigners. The woman looked through the registers: Green Feather, with a drawn sword, stood at the door. As the woman, Anna, sat nearest to Hi, in a good light, he had occasion to notice her very particularly.

She was perhaps seventy years old. She had a face without any mark whatsoever of kindness, or mirth, or hope, or charity. Her eyes were grey, hard and stony: her mouth was a slit, drooped at the ends: her ears were enormous: her hair, which was of a dirty grey, fell untidily about her brow; she kept thrusting it back with a fat red hand, the thick fingers of which were black at the end. She had ploughed and sowed against her enemies for fifty-three years of hatred: now she had her hour.

The prim-lipped man rose from his chair and called:

“Will those English and American subjects come forward?” When they had come forward, he said:

“The commandant of the ward wishes me to say that during these disturbances, in the state of martial law in which we live, foreigners not vouched for by the municipalities in which they sojourn are required to repair on board the ships of the nations to which they belong, or to such other ships as will receive them. Which of you have carnets signed by your municipal authorities?”

None had any such papers.

“None?” the prim-lipped man said. “Very well, then, you will repair on board the ships of your respective nations. A guard will take you from here to the Mole, where boats are now engaged in taking those qualified to go. I will give you here this paper to sign, opposite to your names.”

When all had signed their names, the commandant called an officer, to whom he gave charge to embark the eight at the Mole. The officer called them out to the plaza below the church steps, where troops were halted. Some of the soldiers stood in groups of four facing a blank wall where a flare was burning.

“Firing parties,” someone said. “Some poor devils in the church are for it.”

Hi, looking back, saw the white columns of the portico, with the yellowness of candlelight inside the door, and the blackness of Pluma Verde standing like a death. A squad of troops formed about the eight: the officer gave the order to march. One of the eight began to hum a Dead March.

“We are well out of that,” someone said. “They’ll clear most of that bunch up against the wall.”

“These darned foreigners: why can’t they agree? They’re like a lot of children.”

“Children? They’re like a lot of savages.”

“Well, we come out at the thin end of the horn, whatever they are. We’ll not get ashore again till Lord knows.”

“Surely,” Hi said, “they’ll let us go ashore again, when the troubles are over.”

“When will the troubles be over?”

“I suppose in a week.”

“Not in a year, kid.”

The American had been talking in a low voice to one of the squad of soldiers: he now spoke to the company.

“See there, now,” he said, jerking his head to the right, as they came out upon the water-front, “the Whites got into the town here. They got in at the gate there. The man says that they fit like hell along the beach, till all the lot of them was killed.”

“All the lot?”

“Yep.”

“And Don Manuel, too?”

“Yep. Not one man left alive.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“There goes some more of ’em, who weren’t in the battle at all.”

Behind them, from the direction of the church which they had left, there came a sudden volley of three rifles. After a minute there came another volley, presently a third, then many more.

“These darned Reds,” the American said, “it’s their night to howl. Those were the poor devils we were with a few minutes since; give them a prayer, sons.”

They gave them their prayers, as they marched on in the moonlight along the deserted water-front. All the houses there were dead, with blank eyes. The rhythm of their steps echoed from the walls, the sea washed on the shingle beside them. The shootings still went on near that church of liberty from superstition.

“Blast them,” one of the eight said. “Don’t they pardon anyone?”

“It’s their night to howl,” the American said:

They’re all the way from Bitter Creek, And it’s their night to howl.

“Do you think I could send a message ashore, when we get to the ship?” Hi asked.

“What for?”

“To ask after friends and to get my things.”

“There’ll be darned few messages passing after this.”

“Well, what are we to do, then?”

“What did the cat do?”

“I don’t know. What did he do?”

“He went back, when he couldn’t stay no longer.”

“The Consuls will help us get our things,” a man said.

“The Consuls, hell,” another answered. “We’ll not see a stick nor stitch of anything we had. This land is going to have the bust-up that’s been preparing for years. It will be a year before it’s settled. Perhaps a year after that we may be allowed in again to settle our businesses. Thank God, I saw a little of this coming.”

By this time they were at the Mole, where Hi had landed with such hopes a fortnight before. The water was gleaming over the lower steps. Some men were standing under the Mole light: some soldiers came to attention there as the party drew near.

“Halt, there,” a voice called.

They were called one by one under the light, and sorted out to three boats then lying at the steps, from a French barque, an English ship and an American schooner.

“Will there be any more to-night?” an English sailor asked. “Shall we send the boat in again?”

“We do not know.”

“Well, if any more are to come off, dip your light there and I’ll send the boat in.”

“How?”

“Dip your light. Lower and hoist your light, to let me know you want the boat.”

“It is good.”

“Is it good?” the sailor muttered, as he shepherded his six down the steps to the boat. “You’re about as likely to do it as my Uncle Joe is to have kittens.”

Four ordinary seamen in the boat pulled them clear of the Mole into the harbour, towards the sailing-ship anchorage. The firing-parties were still firing in the town. Away beyond the Farola, a house which had been fired began to burn up brightly. “That’s just about where the Piranhas’ house is,” Hi thought. “They’ve killed the Piranhas, too.”

“What ship are you taking us to?” a man asked.

“_Solita_, Liverpool,” the mate said. “I guess the lid’s off the _Tenderloin_ to-night?”

“They’re playing hell all over.”

“Give way, sons,” the mate said. “Come, put your weights on.”

They pulled on over the sea in the moonlight towards the grove of masts. All were silent now, from weariness and bitterness; there was no sound except the gurgle and wash of the water, the grunt of the oars in the crutches, and sometimes a church-bell, or a volley of shots from the city. The mate who was steering began to croon a hymn as he watched the _Solita’s_ riding-light:

Give me that old time religion, Give me that old time religion, Give me that old time religion, It’s good enough for me.

Singing thus at his hymn, which could be made to last for a day in case of need, he brought his boat to the gangway under the lean iron flank of the _Solita_. The Captain looked down upon him from the poop rail.

“Is that you, Mister?” he asked.

“Yes, sir: I brought six more.”

“Come on up there, you.”

When the six stood on the deck, the captain spoke to them.

“You are on board a British ship,” he said. “The rules are: no smoking and no matches between decks. Any of you caught striking a light below there will sleep on the fo’c’sle head. Write your names here. Anderson, show them where they belong.”

One of the boat’s crew helped them down a perpendicular iron ladder into the gloom of a ’tweendecks which smelt of decayed malt. A spare starboard sidelight cast a green light on one side of this space, so that Hi could see many bodies lying on sails. On the other side of the space two planks upon casks made a table on which some food was spread, in bread-barges.

“You can get your supper if you’d like,” Anderson said, showing the bread-barges. “Or you can turn in on the sails, if you’d rather rest. Your lot makes it forty-one that we got. We’ll be able to have some fine sing-songs. The steward says we shall probably sail within three days for New York. There’s fresh water in the bucket there and a dipper to drink by. Any matches you’ve got, you’ve got to give to me.”

When Anderson had gone, Hi drew away from the six to a lonely space on the sails, where he dragged a hatch cover over himself, so that he might think alone. He had had his first wrestle with life; he reckoned that he had been an utter failure. The future was dark enough, but it was nothing to the darkness of the present.

“I failed,” he thought. “And I’ve probably killed ’Zeke. And ’Zeke has brought Don Manuel to death; and the Piranhas are probably killed too, burnt out, anyway. And I’ve probably settled Carlotta’s fate as well. They are certain to kill her; all by not avoiding politics, as Winter told me. They might all be alive now, if I’d not stirred.”

The mate, who was walking the deck near the hatch, partly lest the boat should be needed, but mainly to detect any striking of a match among the refugees, sat upon the coamings for a minute, humming his tune of the old-time religion. “Ah, the old-time religion,” Hi thought, with the tears running down his face. “Nothing but religion’s any help to a man in my state. Oh, God, I have made a mess of it.”

And Carlotta?

Ah, Carlotta.

XX APPENDICES AND NOTES

On the fate of Carlotta de Leyva.

Carlotta had been killed a week before this.

The day after her arrest, some hours after Hi had started on his journey, Don Lopez ordered Carlotta to pray to him while he sat throned in public on the high altar of the Mission Church of Santa Barbara. On her refusal, he ordered her to be enclosed in a house of common prostitutes.

The mistress of this house, an Englishwoman known as Aunt Jennings, refused to admit her, saying, “That none but a dirty dog would have thought of sending her.”

When this was reported to Don Lopez, he ordered that Carlotta and Aunt Jennings should be taken by the hangman to the new town, and that there their throats should be cut. This deed was at once done by Don Lopez’ son, Don José, assisted by the two half-breeds, Zarzas and Livio.

This was the first of the many crimes committed by the Red party in the year of madness, 1887-1888.

* * * * * * *

Carlotta was put to death at about the moment of Hi’s arrest by the Pituba officer, before he was taken to Ribote.

On the fate of Don Manuel and his army, or what happened on the day of the battle.

When Hi saw the White army near Anselmo, it was moving from its bivouac towards Santa Barbara, expecting to fight that morning. It was delayed in its march by Pituba skirmishers, so that it did not come into position above Santa Clara until after three in the afternoon.

Don Manuel had expected that a part of the Federal army, the San Jacinto Horse, and the battalion of Independents, would declare for him, and either join him or help him. Their officers were known to be Whites and their men were hostile to Lopez. Unfortunately, Colonel Velarte, of the Horse, who was a friend of Hermengildo de Bazan, the White leader, disliked Don Manuel and refused to help him. The Colonel of the Independents felt that the Whites would be ruined if he did not help Don Manuel, but would not help unless he were given the command. While affairs were in this state, the day before the battle, Don Livio disarmed both these battalions and put their officers under arrest, so that the Whites were not helped by any Federal troops.

When the battle began, Don Manuel had with him between six and seven hundred horsemen, armed in various ways, undisciplined, without artillery, and almost without ammunition. The Federal troops opposed to him numbered about four thousand, including the Meruel and Pituba regiments of horse, three battalions of Eastern foot and two batteries of horse artillery.

The battle proper began when Don Manuel’s men came on to the little ridge above Santa Clara church. At that point they came under shell-fire from the batteries, which had been registered upon the ground during the morning. As Don Manuel saw that his only chance was to charge the guns, he charged. His men got into trip wire laid before the guns, and were shot down there by the foot soldiers or routed by the lancers. Some fifty or sixty of the Encinitas men followed Don Manuel to the right of the field, broke through a squad of Meruel horse, made a dash for the city, entered the southern gate, and summoned the fortress to surrender.

Here, through the wit of Don Livio, they were ambushed and driven on to the water-front, where they fought till they were lost. The last of them made a stand about the green boat or lighter which Hi had seen on the morning of his setting out with Rosa. When their last cartridges were gone, they took to the water and were killed in the bay.

Don Manuel, because he took to the water after the others, when the light was worse, contrived to reach the English barque _Venturer_, whose Captain (Gary) received him and brought him to safety. Some five weeks after the battle, he landed in the United States.

Of his army, it is thought that about one-half escaped alive from the battle, and that of these perhaps a third were killed in the pursuit or in the proscriptions which followed. The Federal loss is not known, as the returns were falsified. It is thought that the Reds lost many men in the skirmishing, both before and after the battle.

The battlefield, which was then mainly race ground and market gardens, is now covered by the suburb of Santa Clara. It is a couple of miles from Medinas, on the northern road from the city; at a little distance the ridge (now covered with houses) which was the White position, may still be seen.

On the fate of Donna Emilia and her daughter Rosa.

Donna Emilia died in misery shortly after the outbreak of the troubles (in May, 1887). Her daughter, Rosa Piranha, though proscribed in the September massacre, was saved from death by the devotion of her old nurse. The house which Hi saw burning, as he walked to the Mole, was not the Piranhas’ home; that was spared though sacked. Rosa returned to it when the troubles were over.

In May, 1888, she entered a community of enclosed nuns, to whom she made over all her earthly possessions. In this sisterhood she has lived ever since.

On the fate of Hi, after he went on board the _Solita_.

As the aliens in the ships were not allowed to land again in Santa Barbara during the troubles, Hi, with his fellow refugees, went in the _Solita_ to New York, where he landed.

As his parents felt that he had better stay there, he remained in the United States, where he underwent the adventures and hardships usual to youth. After some months there, it happened, that he met Don Manuel.

As he felt that his life was linked to Don Manuel by ties not easily broken, he joined the band of White refugees sworn to destroy Don Lopez and his faction. With these outcasts he wandered and suffered for some months, till that campaign began which led to the killing of Lopez and the establishment of Don Manuel as Dictator in his stead.

For some years after this, Hi remained in the Western provinces, in Don Manuel’s employment, at work upon the problem dear to him, of perfecting steamboats for river traffic of different kinds. In 1891, when Don Manuel began his great scheme of controlling the San Jacinto River, some of his ideas were put in practice. For the next seven years, he was busily employed on the San Jacinto, in partial or complete charge of the boat service by which the workers on the dam were supplied. The following letter from him, written in early May, 1898, to his mother in England, will fill in some of the blanks in this history:

“On the 15th we had our great day with the opening of the dam. His Excellency, with his staff and a lot of senators and Congressmen, came to the pier at Curucucu, where they took our boats for the last ten miles up to the dam. After the formal opening, there was a banquet, at which H. E. made a very nice speech. He said he did not think the work would ever have been done but for my boats, which perhaps was partly true.

“About a week after the opening they finished the last stretch of the railway so that now the waters are linked with both coasts and my seven years’ job is at an end.

“As I had nothing to do, I was one of the first to take the train to the east through the forest; and I took the opportunity to go over the scenes of my old adventures. I got Dick Binge and Tommy to come with me. I started by going to San Marco, where the marriage party was so kind to me. I found Uncle Philip still living, in the same farm. His niece had married Hernando, the man who dispensed the cordials in the waggon. They were living at a farm near by and doing well. I had promised them when I parted from them to return the clothes they gave me. I couldn’t quite do this, but I was able to get them a couple of pedigree cows from His Excellency, which I hope will thrive up there on the hill.

“After seeing them, we went with a guide two days into the forest to the temple where the cousin of the Hundred Yards Blue nearly plugged me. The place has long since been opened up and explored. From some of the Indians thereabouts I learned of the end of Letcombe-Bassett, if that were his name. It seems that a few days after I escaped, he worked into the temple by himself and made a certain number of finds. A big stone fell across his legs and pinned him there. He called to his Indians to lift the stone, but the Indians wouldn’t, because they hadn’t liked his ways, so he stayed pinned there for three days and nights, till he died of thirst. So Dudley Wigmore was avenged. We had a look for Dudley Wigmore’s bones, but the jungle had taken charge of them. I learned later that one or two of his things and some of the treasure from the temple were recovered and sent to his old mother at Shepton Mallet. This was done by one of Wigmore’s French friends, years ago, during the troubles, soon after I was there. The rest of the things found in the temple are in the museum at Santa Barbara.

“From this point, as so much of the forest had been cleared and a lot of the bog drained, it was easy to make the next stage to the ranch, where the corpse looked through the window. Here I learned what had happened; it had long been a puzzle to me.

“The troop of Pitubas who had burned the Ribote house made one or two forays into the Gaspar country, to burn the houses of other prominent Whites. Word came that afternoon that they were coming to burn this particular ranch. That old ruffian, Don Pablo, who would not let me go to Anselmo, ordered the people to vacate the ranch, and to join his body, which (he said) would then attack the Pitubas. They hurried the women away to safety; then, as they rode out to join Don Pablo, someone in a panic fired a shot, and everybody began to blaze away at nothing. These were the shots which I heard.

“A young Englishman employed in the ranch stayed there after the others lest a telephone call should come through with news of Don Manuel. While he waited, he saw the Pituba spy and shot him through the window; being then thoroughly scared, he took horse and galloped away. I heard him go.

“The telephone call came through while I was there, as I am not likely to forget.

“The people who challenged me and shot my horse, as I left the place, were the Pitubas, who burned the ranch to the ground that night. I found it rebuilt and thriving. That old ruffian, Don Pablo, owns it: he is a Senator and a grandissimo: I saw him there. He looks liker a portrait of a beadle than ever: a beadle or a town-bull.

“From this point we rode through the forest to the place where I went astray in the rain; and thence up the pass to the crater; and so, by degrees, to the Ribotes’ ranch. The old man and wife were still alive. The old man was failing and the old woman had had so many troubles that she did not care to see me, but I paid for my horse, I am glad to say, at last, and heard their news. The daughter had become an enclosed nun and the son, Anton, had been killed in the anti-clerical rebellion five years ago. I was grieved indeed not to see those two again. The house had been divided against itself, like so many during the troubles. From there, I rode on to the little town where I had been jailed. It has become a very prosperous place since I was there. They have built a new town hall and a new jail. They have also changed its name from Ribote to Tres de Mayo. Some don of state had built a lovely palace on the site of the Ribote mansion, which was burned while I was there.

“From here we rode on and camped in the clump where the officer made me a prisoner. Of all the places which I visited, this was the only one which did not seem to have changed. In the morning, we rode on and came to the falls down which I had been swept when I escaped from Brother Bright Tooth and his friend. As there was very little water in the river it did not look the same, but I could see the place with the overhanging bank where I came ashore. Just at the place where I took the water there is now a railway bridge; the track by which I rode on Bright Tooth’s horse has now the railway beside it. The hamlet where Bright Tooth and his mother lived has changed beyond all recognition into a thriving market town, but I found the German. He had become very stout and enormously prosperous. He remembered me quite well and told me all about Bright Tooth and his mother. The mother, he said, went into Santa Barbara during the troubles and was ended when the troubles were ended. Bright Tooth and a friend of his, I hope the friend who was with him when they tried to nobble me, were garrotted under His Excellency for murdering an old woman at Medinas.

“From this point, it was only a short stage to Carpinche, which is now a port for big forest timber. There were ships of up to a thousand tons in the harbour there. I watched them heaving the great red-hearts and green-hearts in through the holes in their bows. Not that the forests are being skinned. They are being planted as well as being cut.

“We took boat here—not a sailing boat, for those have passed away and market produce goes now to the city by train. We went in one of the ferries which ply every hour from Carpinche to Santa Barbara, calling at La Boca. I landed at La Boca to try to find word of Giordano. He had gone back to Italy, they told me, some years ago and was living there near Florence; very rich, they said. Pedro Ruiz was still marketing and gardening. I saw him at last in the flesh and bought some plants from him, which I hope I shall make grow for the sake of old times. The padron of my boat and Chigo had both gone back to Italy: few Italians stay here more than seven years.

“From there I came on to the Farola, where I had the long wait that anxious morning. As I landed in the late afternoon, I was the only person there, except a few anglers fishing for snappers. I could see what used to be the Piranhas’ house, so leaving the pier, I walked up to it. It is now the house of enclosed nuns in which Rosa lives. They are contemplatives, so there was no seeing Rosa: none of us will ever see her again, I suppose. I am too active to take to the monkish way of life myself; but I have seen monks and nuns out here, from time to time, who have made me see something of what they see. When you once see the beauty of holiness, no other beauty seems living. Rosa is happy. I went to the house just when they were singing their service, in that chapel which used to be the Piranhas’ chapel, where Donna Emilia and her husband are buried. I felt very queer, to think that Rosa was singing there and I so near her, listening: and suddenly I knew that she knew that I was listening, and was sending me a message of great happiness.

“In the city, I learned of some of the rest of these people. Don Inocencio was killed in the troubles: murdered the day after Don Manuel lost the battle, like so many other Whites. Allan Winter is still out at Quezon: Weycock is in the Shipping Co. I saw him at the Club: he is a man I cannot stick. Don José is one of his clients, they say: he would be.

“I asked Colonel Peñedo at the War Office if he could find out for me about the Pituba officer who would not let me land and afterwards jailed me. He was a Captain Avellano, it seems; a well-known Red and as brave as they are made. Don Livio, that mongrel scoundrel, was responsible for sending him to Ribote to burn the Ribote house. It seems that he had no written orders to stop the boats at La Boca: in doing that he was probably just being cussed. He was a gallant man in his way: he was killed fighting for Lopez a year later, “fighting like a wild tiger cat, one against twenty,” so Peñedo said. The Pituba officers were usually pretty tough: so I hope he may rest in peace.

“Of some of the other criminals and waifs, upon whose tracks mine impinged, I could learn nothing. Anna the were-wolf got herself shot in the troubles by wanting to be too revolutionary: the Reds did not kill the Whites so that Anna and her friends might rule.

“I haven’t mentioned Ezekiel Rust, because I have so often written to you about him. He and his wife Isabella are still out at Encarnacion; he runs the haras there, in very good style; she seems fond of him: both are well. He always wants to come back to England, to see Tencombe again, but I beg him not to think of it. Many there would recognise him, and although the evidence against him cannot now be strong, he would be certain to incriminate himself, and it would be too pitiful if the poor old chap should get himself hanged or (more probably) shut up as a criminal lunatic. Where he is now, he is a valuable man. Where _he_ is now, Keeper Jackson is, I hope, a valuable ghost. Why not let it rest at that?

“I asked about that picture-dealer on the water-front. It seems that he got a lot of things from the de Leyva collection, chiefly the bronzes. Then Don José tried to get them out of him, and as he wouldn’t sell them, Don José took them, with all his other belongings, and had the man deported. I suppose this is Don J’s nearest approach to a virtuous act. Of course, this was years ago, only a few days after the troubles began.

“H. E. had me out to dine at the palace, to ask me about another job, opening up the Burnt Lands by canals, and would I design the boats? It seems tame, after the San Jacinto: like falling off a log; but I want to be in everything that H. E. is in. He thinks that the B. L. can be planted in patches, if there are catchments. He is the most hopeful soul I know.

“By the way, in the palace, I found the Aztec, the Ribote brother. He is a sort of Secretary for Clerical Affairs, rather a big gun. I did not remind him of our meeting.

“Well, this is a long letter: I must stop.

“Words cannot describe the changes in the city since the bad old ’87 days: no town can have changed more in the time. My love to Bell and Father. I hope to be back in June, for a couple of months: so don’t fill the house up.”

A note added by Highworth Ridden:

“The above was written by me to my mother soon after the completion of the dam, when I revisited Santa Barbara for the first time since the troubles. I left the pier on that morning of the troubles thinking to be back in ten days: I did not return save for that time as a prisoner for more than eleven years.

“What I did not and could not write to my mother, I write now, after another eleven years. It is about Carlotta. It is difficult to set down what she was to me. ‘Calf-love,’ I suppose most people would say. Well, there is a generosity in calf-love that gives it a grace: not that mine had any grace. I saw her on only one day twenty-two years ago: I have thought of her every day since; not as a lover of course (for years past), but as a spirit apart, unlike anyone else that ever was. You who never saw her cannot understand this. She was the most exquisite thing: in life marvellous, in the unspeakable end, heroic: and always so beautiful, so gracious. All who knew her felt this: she had cruel enemies, the mad, the diseased, the godless, the savage and the greedy hated her.

“I went to the chapel of Carlotta, which H. E. built. Her tomb, with her recumbent figure, is there: it is very beautiful. Her sculptured head on the stairs leading to the Plaza is liker her. Gamarro’s painting of her is not like. Bedwyn’s pencil sketch is like. But she was like the light, no one could have painted her.

“I tried to do something for her once, and though I failed, I am prouder of that than of anything else that I have ever done. Whatever she was, she made men know that gleams come into this world from a world beyond, which is better than this.

“H. F. R.”

“When I set out from the hotel on that morning of the troubles, I took with me a scrap of the hermosita which she had broken for me. This being in my pocket-book, was stolen from me at Ribote by the Englishman who got me out of jail. The rest of the spray, being in my trunk at the hotel, was, as I supposed, lost, during the troubles, with all my kit.

“But in 1899, being at the Club in Santa Barbara, I met the then proprietor of the hotel, who said, that he had recently found some trunks and bags in a disused cellar: that these had evidently been put away during the troubles and never claimed since, and were now to be sold. I went to see them, and among them found one of my tin trunks, in which were some ruined clothes. With the clothes, in some hotel blotting-paper, I found the hermosita spray which Carlotta had given to me, and the envelope, addressed by her to Donna Emilia, which I had picked up and kept. So that I have what few have, one of the last gifts and one of the last writings of a lovely soul.

“That is all that one can say of her, that she was a lovely soul. I have met no one in the least like her. I can but thank God for her, knowing that she came from God.

“H. F. R.”

A note upon Carlotta, by Arturo Grau, author of “Memoirs of Those Times.”

“I felt when I met her, what I have felt ever since, that in her mortal body an angel walked, who needed but a small instrument though a perfect one.

“Those who met her, felt despair at their unworthiness beside so much perfection; yet felt exaltation at the thought that such perfection could be in this world. I can truly say, with so many others, that she altered my life for me.”

Another note upon Carlotta, by Roberto Mandariaga.

“None can describe her, nor would one understand, if she were described. She was like a light sent from God.”

Another note upon Carlotta, by Roger Weycock.

“She was a little, sprightly thing with a lot of colour. She was very much of a lady by birth, being a de Leyva; but for this she might have passed for bold. She seemed to me to be very fond of her own opinion, which was not always wise. She had been the spoiled darling all her life; old de Leyva’s pet; the Chavez group worshipped her. Someone had told her, in her youth, that she was like a little fairy. She seemed to me to be always acting the fairy. I do not of course pretend to justify her murder, which must ever remain a blot upon an unconstitutional but, on the whole, rather great administration. At the same time I, who saw her, can testify that she was not the angel from Paradise which some, who never saw her, would have us believe. She was a pert young woman, accustomed to her own way, who had the tragical fate to run counter to a much stronger way than her own. The character of Carlotta de Leyva, as worshipped (this is scarcely too strong a word) at present at Santa Barbara, had no original in the young woman whom I met; it is an invention of the poets (of the sentimental-idealistic school, of whom Tomás de Medellin is the chief exponent), backed by an able but quite unscrupulous propagandist press, whose interest it is to blacken Don Lopez by every means in its power.”

Another note upon Carlotta, by Guillermo de Medellin, father of the poet.

“I saw her almost daily for many years. As a traveller in both hemispheres, I have met many thousands of people; some of them distinguished, a few great, none like her. I have met some with more compelling power; that, after all, was not what she had; she had blessing power, as though she came from Heaven.

“She was one whom many loved; surely all to their great good. No hatred or other evil could exist in a mind full of her memory.

“Once, when she was a little girl, five or six years old, I asked her what she would do when she grew up. She said that she would build everybody a palace. ‘What,’ I said, ‘with your little hands?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘my lover will build it for me.’ This I have so often, often thought of.”

* * * * * * *

The poem “Carlotta,” by Tomás de Medellin, is well-known in Santa Barbara. It is a formless but interesting jumble of writing about her, in sonnets, ballads, lyrics and dramatic dialogues. It contains most of the fables about her which the imagination of the race has seized upon. I quote here some translation from portions of the poem.

The Sonnet of Camilla, Mother of Don Manuel, on hearing of her son’s betrothal to Carlotta:

Lord, when Thy servant, doubting of Thy grace, Went in despair from what she judged Thy frown To search for comfort in an earthly town, Despairing of all help in any place! When she was sure, that not in any case Could her demerits touch the longed for crown, But rather sorrow, that would bring her down Where no light comes, nor joy, nor Bridegroom’s face:

* * * * * * *

Then, in the chaos, lo, a plan revealed. Lo, in the sand, the lilies of the field. All thy blind servant’s darkness of untrust Proven more wicked than her tongue can speak. To her unfaith thou turn’dst the other cheek, And, to her greed, gavest gold that cannot rust.

Lines, on the same occasion. This poem is known in Santa Barbara as “The Vision of Camilla concerning Manuel.”

In the dark night I saw Death drawing near To make me go from here; In all my sin, with all my work undone, Leaving behind my son With no more stay nor path Than what the wild horse hath.

I saw the souls of all my earthly friends Laid bare, their aims and ends; How some might love him, many help, but none Be wisdom to my son. Wisdom that is a road Where no track showed, A dawn, when no lamp glowed.

Thus in the night I heard Death come, I heard The mouse shriek at the bird; My sins came huddled to my bed, the bell Dead hours did tell: There was no light: only the tick of time: Life, strangling in the slime.

Then in the multitude of souls I saw A bright soul, without flaw, Wearing a star upon her brow like heaven In the green light of even. However black (I knew) the night might turn That star would burn.

She reached her hand to me and cried: “Death calls, Time strikes, the hour falls. And like a flight of birds the souls prepare To whirl into the air, To bring to be what none may understand. I shall but light the hand . . .

Lo, here, the light upon my brow shall lead Thy son until he bleed; Until he fail, and falter, and despair. Even in his blackest night I shall be there My star will be his guidance: he will know What light is, from its glow.”

A sonnet upon Ezekiel Rust.

Son of Isaiah Rust, of Churn, his wage Was eighteenpence a day, working for Squire, With rabbits twice a year, and sticks for fire, In a stoopt cottage, broken-backt with age.

His life was among horses from his birth, He uttered cries which horses understood, He handled squire’s stallion in his mood. Strange blood being in him from the ancient earth.

Often, when moons were full, he ranged the Downs, Much like the fox, but liker to the hare Who forms in the thymed grass in the hill air, And sees from the hill edge, as the stars rise, The glare in heaven above the market towns And turns back to the midnight, being wise.

The Meditation of Carlotta in Prison.

This that I understand, This that I touch with hand, This body, that is I, To-day will die.

O given Spirit, now taken, Keep to this truth unshaken, That the good thing, well-willed, Becomes fulfilled.

The Meditation of Highworth Ridden.

I have seen flowers come in stony places; And kindness done by men with ugly faces; And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races; So I trust, too.

The Comfort of Manuel, on Setting Forth defeated in the _Venturer_.

Bad lies behind, worse lies before. What stars there were are in us still; The Moon, the Inconstant, keeps her will, The Sun still scatters out his store, And shall not Man do more?

When the worst comes, the worst is going: As a gate shuts, another opes: The power of man is as his hopes: In darkest night the cocks are crowing. In the sea roaring and wind blowing Adventure: man the ropes.

* * * * *

THE LONDON AND NORWICH PRESS, LIMITED, ST. GILES’ WORKS, NORWICH

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

A Table of Contents has been added for reader convenience.