ee trees,
stirring the monkey-pods, and sighing through the sugar-cane. On the
_lanai_ the hush still reigned. Then it came, the first feel of the
mountain wind, faintly balmy, fragrant and spicy, and cool, deliciously
cool, a silken coolness, a wine-like coolness--cool as only the mountain
wind of Kona can be cool.

"Do you wonder that I lost my heart to Kona eighteen years ago?" he
demanded. "I could never leave it now. I think I should die. It would
be terrible. There was another man who loved it, even as I. I think he
loved it more, for he was born here on the Kona coast. He was a great
man, my best friend, my more than brother. But he left it, and he did
not die."

"Love?" I queried. "A woman?"

Cudworth shook his head.

"Nor will he ever come back, though his heart will be here until he
dies."

He paused and gazed down upon the beachlights of Kailua. I smoked
silently and waited.

"He was already in love . . . with his wife. Also, he had three
children, and he loved them. They are in Honolulu now. The boy is going
to college."

"Some rash act?" I questioned, after a time, impatiently.

He shook his head. "Neither guilty of anything criminal, nor charged
with anything criminal. He was the Sheriff of Kona."

"You choose to be paradoxical," I said.

"I suppose it does sound that way," he admitted, "and that is the perfect
hell of it."

He looked at me searchingly for a moment, and then abruptly took up the
tale.

"He was a leper. No, he was not born with it--no one is born with it; it
came upon him. This man--what does it matter? Lyte Gregory was his
name. Every _kamaina_ knows the story. He was straight American stock,
but he was built like the chieftains of old Hawaii. He stood six feet
three. His stripped weight was two hundred and twenty pounds, not an
ounce of which was not clean muscle or bone. He was the strongest man I
have ever seen. He was an athlete and a giant. He was a god. He was my
friend. And his heart and his soul were as big and as fine as his body.

"I wonder what you would do if you saw your friend, your brother, on the
slippery lip of a precipice, slipping, slipping, and you were able to do
nothing. That was just it. I could do nothing. I saw it coming, and I
could do nothing. My God, man, what could I do? There it was, malignant
and incontestable, the mark of the thing on his brow. No one else saw
it. It was because I loved him so, I do believ