The crimson butterfly

James Battiscombe--district officer at Rembakut--emerged from the little courthouse that formed the ground floor of his bungalow, directed his monocle upon a group of natives th...

“Good-bye, little woman. Give my regards to Moberly. Perhaps it’s just as well you couldn’t come. The Commissioner sent word this morning that he wanted to see me, and I expect...

A stretch of powdery sand, bleached white by a relentless Eastern sun, bordered on three sides by trees through which--to the eastward--ran a gleaming single track of railway li...

It was towards nine o’clock when Vera Battiscombe, immersed in the contents of a paper-covered volume, heard a horseman come flying across the night-shrouded clearing and slithe...

A suggestion of the old weakness of character crept into his face. He remained for some moments blinking into her eyes as a man trying to accustom his gaze to the light. Present...

That night Vera Battiscombe dreamed a peculiar dream; peculiar because she rarely dreamed at all, and doubly peculiar because she had no memory of ever falling off to sleep or,...

She was still lying in the long chair on the verandah and the blue sun-blinds had been drawn. There filtered up to her through the morning air the chattering of natives, the con...

“A most intelligent Sikh, whom I encountered in my travels, constructed it in less than twenty minutes. He happened to have the materials handy. You see, it’s quite simple. Just...

“I sent for him right away, but the messenger came back with the information that he had run over to Kudat and was not expected back before Tuesday. The estate apothecary has ha...

“Well, you’d better go straight into that room where you see the door open. You will find Mr. Vance there with an English lady who has fainted. I want you to do all you can for...

“I’m thirsting for information,” she explained softly. “Whenever I approach father--he just glares at me and carries on a conversation with somebody else. I’ve tried Mr. Trevor,...

“Oh, all right. Send him in here--Oh, just a minute, Trevor. We might as well let him down as lightly as we can. Tell Vance the yarn is that Mrs. B. was picked up in the trees o...

“I think she’s nice and comfortable now. Her temperature’s not normal yet; but there’s been an appreciable drop since this afternoon. I’m hoping she’ll sleep till the morning. A...

“I happen to be blessed with a peculiarly keen sense of smell,” he declared. “When that black fellow passed me this afternoon, I caught a faint suggestion of something sickly an...

He who had played an important rôle in the first and second acts of the drama at Bukit-Serang had been dropped out of the third act altogether--and he was feeling pretty miserab...

“I hadn’t thought of that. All right, you stop here--and mind, I don’t want you to go into that room. Mai-Heng was never an over-clean specimen of humanity--and as he is now he...

“Looking back a bit, I fancy I’ve already told you more than I ought; certainly more than is good for you. Now you can realise something of the nature of the shock I suffered wh...

“When I opened the door,” pursued Trevor, “the butterfly flew past me and frightened Miss Standen. I tried to kill it, but missed--and it flew away. The pendant didn’t seem to b...

He cast an appreciative eye over a rolling and varied landscape. Beyond the belt of trees through which they had passed the night before, he caught the vivid green of young padd...

Mrs. Battiscombe’s illness, prolonged as it had been, had taken a decided turn for the better, and in the case of an unexpected relapse Dr. Macnally was now within easy call.

She lay there, clasping at his knees, fragile as a piece of rare porcelain, with eyes as innocent in their gaze as those of a child, and it was minutes before Armourer could mak...

Abu-Samar had given her the Crimson Butterfly; that fact he regarded as completely established. He had given it her on the afternoon of the day preceding Moberly’s death, she ha...

“Dear Michael,” it read, “I can bear it no longer. Whenever I close my eyes I see him. I see the rocks in the wilderness, the red light from the brazier--and him, beckoning me....

The planter pointed to the concrete floor of the professor’s laboratory. The fluid from the broken bottle had formed a dark patch which had spread--like a fantastic map--halfway...

Sembilan had divested himself of the boots his uniform included and, knotting the laces together, carried them over one shoulder. The stiffness of military training had gone out...

Armourer posted a man at either entrance to his house, and, by dint of patient reasoning with the brown girl, eventually succeeded in persuading her to accompany him to the vera...

Besides Sembilan and the two soldiers he had dispatched with a note and provisions for Trevor, the force at his disposal consisted of a corporal and two men, and from midnight o...

The magistrate was ordered to proceed on his expedition against Abu-Samar with the least delay possible; at the same time, he was on no account to leave Jelandang before a suita...

When Vera Battiscombe came to her senses, she found herself lying on a sort of hammock made from the entire skin of some animal and fastened at either end to a wooden frame by m...

To-morrow! Grasping in her ocean of trouble at a floating spar, this word gave her immeasurable consolation. Michael, Jim, all of them perhaps would be searching for her, and th...

Night and day they had pressed forward, halting only to ease the bearers when the sun was at its height, and, of the European members of the party, only Joyce had enjoyed more t...

Ably instructed by the indefatigable Kuraman--who had reported three men as dead and delivered the remaining third to Standen for treatment--a breastwork of cases and boulders w...

Consequently, when he and the professor, with their handful of men, joined the tribesmen who squatted outside the breastwork, he led Dara forward, holding a lamp so that its lig...

The summit of the next hill revealed to them a vast circular amphitheatre from the centre of which a path led up to the spot where, at the top of a huge mound, an enormous brazi...

other side of the black waters and that there are many men waiting at but a little distance. Tell them that I come as a friend, to find my wife, whom Samar has taken, and go awa...

“We’ll tell you all about it as soon as we’ve found somewhere comfortable to sit and something warm to drink. We’ve had a most successful and memorable outing; but it was touch-...