and so when he
topped the point and came again within sight of the river he saw that
which drew an angry oath from his lips--his quarry already was half way
across the river.

Turning, he ran rapidly back to his boats, the head man at his heels.
Throwing themselves in, Malbihn urged his paddlers to their most
powerful efforts. The canoes shot out into the stream and down with
the current toward the fleeing quarry. She had almost completed the
crossing when they came in sight of her. At the same instant she saw
them, and redoubled her efforts to reach the opposite shore before they
should overtake her. Two minutes' start of them was all Meriem cared
for. Once in the trees she knew that she could outdistance and elude
them. Her hopes were high--they could not overtake her now--she had
had too good a start of them.

Malbihn, urging his men onward with a stream of hideous oaths and blows
from his fists, realized that the girl was again slipping from his
clutches. The leading canoe, in the bow of which he stood, was yet a
hundred yards behind the fleeing Meriem when she ran the point of her
craft beneath the overhanging trees on the shore of safety.

Malbihn screamed to her to halt. He seemed to have gone mad with rage
at the realization that he could not overtake her, and then he threw
his rifle to his shoulder, aimed carefully at the slim figure
scrambling into the trees, and fired.

Malbihn was an excellent shot. His misses at so short a distance were
practically non-existent, nor would he have missed this time but for an
accident occurring at the very instant that his finger tightened upon
the trigger--an accident to which Meriem owed her life--the
providential presence of a water-logged tree trunk, one end of which
was embedded in the mud of the river bottom and the other end of which
floated just beneath the surface where the prow of Malbihn's canoe ran
upon it as he fired. The slight deviation of the boat's direction was
sufficient to throw the muzzle of the rifle out of aim. The bullet
whizzed harmlessly by Meriem's head and an instant later she had
disappeared into the foliage of the tree.

There was a smile on her lips as she dropped to the ground to cross a
little clearing where once had stood a native village surrounded by its
fields. The ruined huts still stood in crumbling decay. The rank
vegetation of the jungle overgrew the cultivated ground. Small trees
already had sprung up in what had