as late that day as they climbed up out of a steaming valley into
higher ground that Binhart pulled up and studied Blake's face.

"Jim, you look like a sick man to me!" he declared. He said it without
exultation; but there was a new and less passive timber to his voice.

"I 've been feeling kind o' mean this last day or two," confessed
Blake. His own once guttural voice was plaintive, as he spoke. It was
almost a quavering whine.

"Had n't we better lay up for a few days?" suggested Binhart.

"Lay up nothing!" cried Blake, and he clenched that determination by an
outburst of blasphemous anger. But he secretly took great doses of
quinin and drank much native liquor. He fought against a mental
lassitude which he could not comprehend. Never before had that ample
machinery of the body failed him in an emergency. Never before had he
known an illness that a swallow or two of brandy and a night's rest
could not scatter to the four winds. It bewildered him to find his
once capable frame rebelling against its tasks. It left him dazed, as
though he had been confronted by the sudden and gratuitous treachery of
a life-long servant.

He grew more irritable, more fanciful. He changed guides at the next
native village, fearing that Binhart might have grown too intimate with
the old ones. He was swayed by an ever-increasing fear of intrigues.
He coerced his flagging will into a feverish watchfulness. He became
more arbitrary in his movements and exactions. When the chance came,
he purchased a repeating Lee-Enfield rifle, which he packed across his
sweating back on the trail and slept with under his arm at night. When
a morning came when he was too weak and ill to get up, he lay back on
his grass couch, with his rifle across his knees, watching Binhart,
always watching Binhart.

He seemed to realize that his power was slipping away, and he brooded
on some plan for holding his prisoner, on any plan, no matter what it
might cost.

He even pretended to sleep, to the end that Binhart might make an
effort to break away--and be brought down with a bullet. He prayed
that Binhart would try to go, would give him an excuse for the last
move would leave the two of them lying there together. Even to perish
there side by side, foolishly, uselessly, seemed more desirable than
the thought that Binhart might in the end get away. He seemed
satisfied that the two of them should lie there, for all time, each
holding the other down