ing my pony by the nose picked _him_
up. A touch of his throbbing flanks, however, warned me as I was putting
my foot into the stirrup. I left him there and thundered on foot down
the lane. I have said I was mad. 'Yip-yip-yah-ah, yip-yip-yah-ah!' I
yelled as I dashed on--a yell I had heard among California cattlemen. It
must have paralyzed that flying personage, for I gained upon him
shockingly. I could hear him pant, a queer, patient panting, a sigh
rather, a gentle, lamenting sighing, and the white _camisa_ flapped
ghostily in the darkness. Suddenly he burst out of obscurity, past the
plantation, into the glaring moonlight. And I--I stopped short, went
down on my hands and knees, and crouched back into the shadow. For the
man running was Miller; Miller, wild, sobbing, disheveled, his shoulders
drawn up to his ears in terrible weariness, his whole body taut with
fear, and scudding, scudding away, low along the ground, his chin
forward, mournful as a stork. Soon he was across the luminous space, and
then he disappeared into the darkness on the other side, flopped head
first into it as if hiding his face in a pillow.

"I returned slowly to my horse. He was standing where I had left him,
his four legs far apart in a wide base. Between them was the thing cast
off by Miller which had thrown us. I examined it by the light of a box
of matches. It was a bunch of bananas, one of those gigantic clusters
which can be cut from the palms. I got on my horse and rode back home.

"I didn't go to see him any more. A man who will steal bananas in a
country where they can be bought a dozen for one cent is too mean to be
worth visiting. I had another reason, too. It had dawned on me that
Miller probably did not care to see any of us, that he had come down to
a mode of life which would not leave him appreciative of confrontations
with past standards. It was almost charity to leave him to himself.

"So I left him to himself, and he lived on in his pestilential little
hole, alone--lived a life more squalid every day. It wasn't at all a
healthy life, you can understand, no healthier physically than morally.
After a while I heard that he was looking bad, yellow as a lemon, and
the dengue cracking at his bones. I began to think of going to him after
all, of jerking him out of his rut by force, if necessary, making him
respect the traditions of his race. But just then came that Nichols
affair, and flaring, his other bad side--his abject
coward