mes on it, there's no use
o' sitting here," and walked straight forward at a brisk pace. Then he
suddenly stopped, shook his head again, and said, "If I goes on like
this, an' it shud turn out to be the wrong course arter all--wot'll come
on't?"

Being as unable to answer this question as the former, he thrust both
hands into his pockets, looked at the ground and began to whistle. When
he looked up again he ceased whistling very abruptly, and turned deadly
pale--perhaps we should say yellow. And no wonder, for there, straight
before him, not more than twenty yards off, stood a creature which, to
his ignorant eyes, appeared to be a fiend incarnate, but which was in
reality a large-sized and very ancient sheego monkey.

It stood in an upright position like a man, and was above four feet
high. It had a bald head, grey whiskers, and an intensely black
wrinkled face, and, at the moment Jim Scroggles' eyes encountered it,
that face was working itself into such a variety of remarkable and
hideous contortions that no description, however graphic, could convey a
correct notion of it to the reader's mind. Seen behind the bars of an
iron cage it might, perhaps, have been laughable; but witnessed as it
was, in the depths of a lonely forest, it was appalling.

Jim Scroggles' knees began to shake. He was fascinated with horror.
The huge ape was equally fascinated with terror. It worked its wrinkled
visage more violently than ever. Jim trembled all over. In another
second the sheego displayed not only all its teeth--and they were
tremendous--but all its gums, and they were fearful to behold, besides
being scarlet. Roused to the utmost pitch of fear, the sheego uttered a
shriek that rang through the forest like a death-yell. This was the
culminating point. Jim Scroggles turned and fled as fast as his long
and trembling legs could carry him.

The sheego, at the same instant, was smitten with an identically similar
impulse. It turned, uttered another yell, and fled in the opposite
direction; and thus the two ran until they were both out of breath.
What became of the monkey we cannot tell; but Jim Scroggles ran at
headlong speed straight before him, crashing through brake and bush, in
the full belief that the sheego was in hot pursuit, until he came to a
mangrove swamp; here his speed was checked somewhat, for the trees grew
in a curious fashion that merits special notice.

Instead of rising out of the ground, the mangro