oolies and his Chinese cook. His domain comprised a
thousand square miles of forest through which he moved constantly on
horseback, followed by elephants bearing his camp equipage and
supplies. Once each month he spent three days in the village where the
company maintains its field headquarters. Here he played tennis and
bridge with other girdlers--young Englishmen like himself who had come
in from their respective districts to make their monthly reports--and
in gleaning from the eight-weeks-old newspapers the news of that great
outside world from which he was a voluntary exile. One would have
supposed that, after seven years spent in the jovial atmosphere of a
warship's wardroom, his solitary life in the great forests would
quickly have become intolerable, and I expressed myself to this effect.
But he said no, that he was neither lonely nor unhappy in his new life,
and that his fellow foresters, all of whom had seen service in the
Army, the Navy or the Royal Air Force, were equally contented with
their lot. I could understand, though. The wilderness holds no terrors
for anyone who went through the hell of the Great War.

We dropped anchor at midnight off Chantaboun, where a launch was
waiting to take him ashore. He was going up-country, he told me, to
inspect a timber concession recently acquired by the company that
employed him. Yes, he would be the only white man, but he would not be
lonely. Besides, he would only be in the interior a couple of months,
he said. He followed the coolies bearing his luggage down the gangway
and dropped lightly into the tossing launch, then looked up to wave me
a farewell.

"Good luck," he called cheerily.

"Good luck to _you_!" said I.

That is the worst of this gadding up and down the earth--it is
always--"How d'ye do?" and "Good-by."

Three days out of Bangkok the anchor of the _Chutututch_ rumbled down
off Kep, on the coast of Cambodia. Kep consists of a ramshackle wooden
pier that reaches seaward like a lean brown finger, an equally decrepit
custom house, a tin-roofed bungalow which the French Government
maintains for the use of those fever-stricken officials who need the
tonic of sea air, a cluster of bamboo huts thatched with nipa--nothing
more. You will not find the place on any map; it is too small.

It is in the neighborhood of three hundred kilometers from Kep to
Pnom-Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and for nearly the entire distance
the highway has been hewn through the