ill. Slipping on some clothes, I followed him out into the clearing,

where the black oozy soil sank down under our feet after the night’s fierce rain and the pools were sending out unwholesome steam in the growing warmth of day.

“What’s to pay now?” I said.

The Marquis looked all round and then replied in a cautious half-whisper:

“Flint, God of my Gods, he has engraved all the glass!”

“Who has engraved what glass? Are you crazy?” I asked. “Did you get that soda water? This place is fairly soaking in whisky; seems it’s you now.”

“You mistake yourself――I am not drunk. It is that red-eye man I talk of. Last night, when he walk about behind the bar with that stone, he has cut all the glass with it.”

“Burchell says he never remembers anything next day,” I said, not seeing the full force of what had happened.

“That may be, but when Burchell come into the bar by a little, he shall see it, and all the men who shall drink out of those glass, they shall see, and, my word, the jig is up!”

“You’re right, Marky, it will be,” I said seriously. “Seems to me the best thing we can do is to clear off right away.”

“No, that’s a cabbage-head thing to do, my Flint. We are too near, if some of them begins to think. No, it is for you, or for me, to get very much drunk very quick, and smash all that glass in one blow!”

“Let’s go and have a look,” I said.

It was only too true. The whisky, like Clara Vere de Vere, must have “put strange memories in the head” of the red-eyed man, whom I now suspected to have had more experience with stones than the rest. He had scratched and cut two or three bottles, and a number of glasses in a way that could not possibly have passed unnoticed, and that could not, either, have been mistaken for anything but the work of a diamond. There are some things that will scratch glass fairly well, but nothing on earth that will cut into it clear and deep and clean save the king of precious stones.

We stood there in the half light of the ugly slab-built room, that was all stale with dregs of drink and littered with rubbish, straw and paper――looking at each other.

“There isn’t much time to waste,” I said. “Which of us is going to do it?”

“My friend, it is I who make this sacrifice,” said the Marquis solemnly. “I haven’t no doubt that you could get intoxicated if I asked you in the name of friendship――――”

“Oh, yes, I think I could manage that much,” I said. “Though I’m not a drinking man, Marky, and never have been.”

“But I do not ask. Because, you see, Flint, you are brave, but you are not artist. Now me, I am both the two. I can act――name of a little good man, but I can act! You have seen me, in the dance――if I had not been noble, I had been the most celebrated actor in Europe.”

“That’s right; I’ll allow you can act,” I said.

“And see, if you were to do this thing, you would not do it as an artist; you would quite simply get drunk, and perhaps, in the strong man’s rage, you should kill some one, but you should not keep the head cool to destroy this evidence here. So I am drunk. In two minutes, I sacrifice my character. You shall see.”

I did see.

I do not think, while I still hold on to life, I shall ever forget the scene that took place in the bar of the Kilori goldfield, there, in the early sunrise, with the Papuan carriers coming in singing to their morning’s work, and the giant Gaura pigeons, in the bush outside, beginning to toll their golden bells. It was a quiet spot enough at six o’clock; at five minutes past it was pandemonium. The Marquis went outside to find a miner’s pick; came back with it, looked about him, spat deliberately on his hands, “to envulgarize himself,” as he explained, seized the pick, uttered a madman’s yell and went Berserk on the spot.

It was exactly like poking a stick into an ants’ nest. You find a quiet little hill of clay, with nothing stirring round about; you smash into it with your boot-heel or a bit of wattle, and instantly the earth is covered in every direction with a scrambling, scurrying――doubtless, if one could hear them, a screaming――crowd, all bent on knowing what has caused the disturbance.

That was what occurred at the Kilori goldfield store on that peaceful, beautiful southeast season morning, with the birds singing and the river gently flowing just outside and the sun coming up above the trees to look down on another day. The storekeeper jumped out of his bed and ran into the bar, pajama-clad; the cooky-boys scuttled in from the kitchen and peered round the corner of the doorway, wonder-eyed; the miners and the new-chums and the hangers-on of the camp all came running as fast as they could, some with blankets still hanging round their necks, to see what was going on. They were used to rows in the neighborhood of the store, but not to the sort of row that the Marquis kicked up――doing it, as he afterwards explained to me, “in artist.”

If I had not known the truth, I should have thought him not only intoxicated but mad. His gigantic figure, clad in pink and green pajamas, seemed to fill the store; he had at least a dozen arms and legs and every one of them smashed everything it touched. The canvas chairs were trampled as though by an elephant. The rickety bar, built up of whisky cases, went like a match-box. He leaped the remnants and swung his pick along the shelf where the glasses stood. Not one of them survived. He seized a bottle of whisky in each hand and slung the two half across the clearing.

“Oh, my Lord! Oh, my Lord!” the storekeeper kept saying. “Who’s to pay for this?”

“Stop him!” yelled the miners, as they saw the whisky begin to go. The Marquis shot me a glance as he swung his pick above a cask of beer, and I will swear there was a wink in it. By this time all the incriminating glass was gone.

The murder of a man, I think, would have been looked upon more calmly than the murder of a cask of beer, up here on the Kilori goldfield, a long week from the coast. But this last exploit was never carried through. With one accord, the miners flung themselves upon the handle of the pick and dragged it down. They dragged the Marquis down next by sheer force of numbers and sat upon him. One even counseled them to “sit upon his head!” and flung his own body across the Marquis’s fat cheek, as if he were a kicking horse.

He did not resist. I caught another lightning wink from underneath the surging pile and I did my best to get the indignant miners off.

“He’ll be all right now if you let him alone,” I declared. “I’ve often known him like this, and when it’s over, it’s over. After all, he’s only done for a couple of quarts of whisky and a few tumblers.”

“Where’s what he’s drunk, to make him like this?” yelled the insulted storekeeper. “He’s got to pay for all he took and all he done. Marquis! A nice sort of marquis he is, I don’t think!”

“He took a bottle to his room with him last night,” I said hastily. “It doesn’t take much to make him like this; he has no head. You’ll be paid all right, Burchell; he’s got any amount of money.”

“Let him up, boys,” ordered the storekeeper. The diggers got off reluctantly and left the Marquis on the floor, breathing hard and looking wild.

“Come and lie down somewhere,” I said. “We’ve got to make a start today and you won’t be fit. Come on.” I led him off, reeling and staggering realistically and falling on my neck in a mimic drunken frenzy of affection. He kept it up till we reached the sleeping shed――empty now――and then drew himself erect and became more dignified and Marquisatorial than I should have thought any man could be in bare feet and pink pajamas, with his hair all over his face.

“I have sacrificed myself,” he said. “My character, she is gone. But procrastination is the steed that is stolen; I have act at once and we are saved.”

“You stop there and don’t get well too quick, in case any one comes back,” I said. “I’m off to get our packs ready and the carriers under way. The sooner we get out of this the better, Marky. I want the society of a few nice restful cannibals to quiet down my nerves.”

VII

CONCERNING A CASSOWARY AND A HYMN BOOK