bushed
appeared too many to be pleasant. A hurrying man, who is also
heavily-laden, cannot pick his footsteps with the meticulous care that
he would like, and it seemed within the bounds of probability that some
strange listener might start out on my track and put an abrupt period to
my career of usefulness. I have an unqualified and not unreasonable
objection to being cut off in what is practically the flower of my
youth. I was afraid. I admit that quite frankly, and I have yet to find
the man who has not known fear whenever he drifted into a tight corner.
But fear is not the hall-mark of a coward; it is at worst a natural
impulse to seek safety and take precautions, and at its best it is the
intellectual penalty that a strong man pays for having a will-power that
will not permit him to scurry away from danger and earth himself like a
rabbit in its burrow.

I reached the valley without incident, scrambled down the historic
slope, now as slippery as a child's mud-slide, and was half-way across
the open space before I received my first shock. Some queer sixth sense
pulled me up in mid-stride. I had heard nothing, I had seen nothing; but
for all that I knew that a strange and obtrusive presence was very close
to me. The New Guinea native can at times tell the presence of an enemy
simply by his sense of smell, and I suppose I've lived so long amongst
them that I have acquired something of this kind. Be this as it may, I
was aware of the other man's proximity long before my faculties went
into action and confirmed me in my belief.

I slipped my shoulders out of the pack-strings and dropped it
noiselessly on the ground. At that precise instant I heard a stealthy
movement on my left hand. It was so dark that I could not see an inch in
front of my face, but a little eddy of the breeze brought me the merest
whiff of stale tobacco--the sort of smell that comes from a pipe that
has been put out before it has completely burnt away. It was that dead
scent that always seems to hang about the vicinity of a newly quenched
fire. I was so close that I caught the sound of the man's breathing.
With every second breath there came a barely perceptible wheeze, and in
an instant my mind flashed back to the night of the burglary in Bryce's
house and the man I had caught coming out of the library. I was so sure
of it that I wasted no further time in stalking him; no two men in the
world could have that same regular wheezing breath. It requires