and sharper than a safety-razor. And then I chuckled softly
to myself, and set out to the fastidiously appointed private office of
Monsieur Louis Devoe, usurper to the hand of the Pearl of the Pacific.

He was never slow at thinking; he gave one look at my face and another
at the weapon in my hand as I entered his door, and then he seemed
to fade from my sight. I ran to the back door, kicked it open, and
saw him running like a deer up the road toward the wood that began
two hundred yards away. I was after him, with a shout. I remember
hearing children and women screaming, and seeing them flying from the
road.

He was fleet, but I was stronger. A mile, and I had almost come up
with him. He doubled cunningly and dashed into a brake that extended
into a small canon. I crashed through this after him, and in five
minutes had him cornered in an angle of insurmountable cliffs. There
his instinct of self-preservation steadied him, as it will steady even
animals at bay. He turned to me, quite calm, with a ghastly smile.

"Oh, Rayburn!" he said, with such an awful effort at ease that I was
impolite enough to laugh rudely in his face. "Oh, Rayburn!" said he,
"come, let's have done with this nonsense. Of course, I know it's the
fever and you're not yourself; but collect yourself, man--give me that
ridiculous weapon, now, and let's go back and talk it over."

"I will go back," said I, "carrying your head with me. We will see
how charmingly it can discourse when it lies in the basket at her
door."

"Come," said he, persuasively, "I think better of you than to suppose
that you try this sort of thing as a joke. But even the vagaries of
a fever-crazed lunatic come some time to a limit. What is this talk
about heads and baskets? Get yourself together and throw away that
absurd cane-chopper. What would Miss Greene think of you?" he ended,
with the silky cajolery that one would use toward a fretful child.

"Listen," said I. "At last you have struck upon the right note. What
would she think of me? Listen," I repeated.

"There are women," I said, "who look upon horsehair sofas and currant
wine as dross. To them even the calculated modulation of your
well-trimmed talk sounds like the dropping of rotten plums from a tree
in the night. They are the maidens who walk back and forth in the
villages, scorning the emptiness of the baskets at the doors of the
young men who would win them.

"One such as they," I said, "is waiting. Only a fool