t on events. But
he had seen from the trees where the "white fella mahrster him diver"
forgathered with all the fiends of the pit, whereat he was "too much
fright," and he showed us this time up the platform of the identical
wide-thatched house by which we had been standing. We crept in through
the low entrance and across a floor of sagging bamboo mats and found
ourselves before a curtain of pandanus that hung midway. We were long
past astonishment, but Jeckol, arresting a gesture, dropped his hand.

"I daren't," he whimpered.

It was Bartlet who put the curtain aside. And there, in the twilight of
the place, we saw the god as he had appeared in his recent earthly
phase. His great copper head gleamed at the back of a shallow niche,
made fast against the wall. The muffled, stiff clumsiness of his diving
dress revealed a heroic figure, still disposed in the attitude of a
sitting Buddha, with the leaden-soled diving shoes thrust out by either
knee. His single huge eye glared down at us balefully from over the
altar as we stood, overwhelmed in the presence. "And so he did--pass
out," said Jeckol.

Something had caught the quick eye of Peters. Horrified, we saw him step
forward and lay a vigorous and sacrilegious hold on that high divinity,
saw the shape start and tremble as with life, saw it shake and flutter
like a bundle of rags in the wind, and flap--emptily....

"Yes," said Peters. "He's passed out, right enough. Leastways from here.
Passed out, and on. And quite easy too. Look at these slits--would you?"

* * * * *

The diving suit had been laid open like a stripped pelt with long cuts
of a keen blade, one down the middle of the back, one across the
shoulders, and others connected along the inside of each limb to the
wrists and ankles.

"Gone!"

"Gone," confirmed Peters. "Whether the niggers dug him from it piece by
piece like the kernel from a nut or whether that friend of his helped
him to shed complete--you can take your choice. In either case he's
gone--and gone this time to stay."

"There's no--no blood!" gasped Jeckol. "Anyhow!"

Cap'n Bartlet had removed his hat to polish his shiny forehead with the
colorful kerchief, and he was looking out of the door over the tops of
the trees to the far blue and nameless mountains of Papua, with an eye
at peace.

"You could always bank on the luck of James O'Shaughnessy Albro," he
said simply. "I knew he was alive."

But Jeckol w