been harmless enough, but the range was
short and I had once been a marksman. I saw the man crumple forward with
a short, strangled groan. I saw those at the back crowding one another
over the cliff in the panic of their disordered flight. They had not
seen me. They knew only that bolts of death were striking them down. I
heard endless thunders as the pistol report sent its echoes beating and
rebounding against the confined walls of the fissure. Blue and slender
lines of spiraling smoke went drifting out into the air. I caught a
glimpse of two bolder spirits stopping to drag away their dead. Then I
collapsed and lay for hours where I had fallen.

Once more I awoke with a moist forehead and a hunger which gnawed at the
pit of my stomach. Only the gods knew how long I had been without food.
The air fanned me with the soft, reviving breath of night. The moon,
riding up the east made an irregular diagram of silvered light across
the ledge, and fell with a reassuring touch of ivoried white, on the
newspaper sheet and the portrait.

I was too famished and spent to stand, but I made the journey down to
the beach on hands and knees, and when I had eaten my fill of unsavory
crabs I lay for a time in the grateful coolness of the wet sand and drew
new strength from its healing. My sickness was ended. The pitiable
weakness that had made the downward journey a torture was the heritage
of hunger. I had needed no medicine but food, and now I found myself
able to walk back upright. That night I slept sweetly and dreamed once
again of the familiar door beyond which lay luxury and security.

The sun was high when I awoke with a sense of great refreshment and
recovery. The slit of sky framed in the rift was not yet hot, but
tenderly blue with a color of promise. The fronds of fern and palm
stirred to the land breeze. I went down to my surf bath and breakfast
with an almost buoyant step. A half-hour after my return, when I turned
to look at the jungle edge a sight greeted me which demonstrated the
decision of the natives that our intercourse was not so soon to become a
closed incident.

This time, however, their coming was characterized by a more gratifying
element of respect. They swarmed out of the bush, not in paltry dozens
nor scores, but in their panoplied hundreds. Gorgeously decked chiefs
and the club-bearing warriors smeared with indigo halted in the open,
leaving a satisfying interval between their position and mine. With
grea