in his hand insinuated itself nearer and
nearer to the breast of the unconscious lad. Now it stopped but a few
inches above the strongly beating heart.

But the pressure of a finger lay between the harmless boy and eternity.
The soft bloom of youth still lay upon the brown cheek, a smile half
parted the beardless lips. Did any qualm of conscience point its
disquieting finger of reproach at the murderer?

To all such was Alexander Paulvitch immune. A sneer curled his bearded
lip as his forefinger closed upon the trigger of his revolver. There
was a loud report. A little hole appeared above the heart of the
sleeping boy, a little hole about which lay a blackened rim of
powder-burned flesh.

The youthful body half rose to a sitting posture. The smiling lips
tensed to the nervous shock of a momentary agony which the conscious
mind never apprehended, and then the dead sank limply back into that
deepest of slumbers from which there is no awakening.

The killer dropped quickly into the skiff beside the killed. Ruthless
hands seized the dead boy heartlessly and raised him to the low
gunwale. A little shove, a splash, some widening ripples broken by the
sudden surge of a dark, hidden body from the slimy depths, and the
coveted canoe was in the sole possession of the white man--more savage
than the youth whose life he had taken.

Casting off the tie rope and seizing the paddle, Paulvitch bent
feverishly to the task of driving the skiff downward toward the Ugambi
at top speed.

Night had fallen when the prow of the bloodstained craft shot out into
the current of the larger stream. Constantly the Russian strained his
eyes into the increasing darkness ahead in vain endeavour to pierce the
black shadows which lay between him and the anchorage of the Kincaid.

Was the ship still riding there upon the waters of the Ugambi, or had
the ape-man at last persuaded himself of the safety of venturing forth
into the abating storm? As Paulvitch forged ahead with the current he
asked himself these questions, and many more beside, not the least
disquieting of which were those which related to his future should it
chance that the Kincaid had already steamed away, leaving him to the
merciless horrors of the savage wilderness.

In the darkness it seemed to the paddler that he was fairly flying over
the water, and he had become convinced that the ship had left her
moorings and that he had already passed the spot at which she had l