Chapter IX: Part 9

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.”