Madness from the sky

by H. de Vere Stacpoole

Illustration: "He did not know that what he was fighting was not a fancy but a necessity great as the necessity for water."

 

MADNESS FROM
THE SKY

A STORY OF THE PAMPAS

By H. DE VERE STACPOOLE

ILLUSTRATED BY W. R. S. STOTT

LUGGARD standing on the quay at Buenos Aires was worth considering. Young, tall, strongly built and good-looking, he was spoiled, if at all, by the something forceful and practical that added ten years to his apparent age.

Practicality and force are excellent attributes, especially of a machine; in man, beyond a certain point they tend to crowd out the more human elements and the softer qualities. I am not saying they had done this in the case of Luggard, but at least it was safe to predict that with him sentiment would never be allowed to thwart action.

Of all things that move the machine is the only thing entirely sane, and remembering instinctively that truth and looking at Luggard, one might have said: "Here is something perfectly balanced, never varying and sure as far as humanly possible to answer to call as a marine engine or one of those derricks just finished lading cargo into the Tagus."

Half seated on a bollard close by and backgrounded by the Tagus was Fallon, Luggard's friend, assistant and paid partner in this expedition he was making down to the wilds of Patagonia in search of the bones of vanished animals; a dry, sunburnt, hard-bitten man of forty or so with a pleasant irregular face, the strongest feature of which was the nose.

They were waiting for the truck with their luggage, which was coming along the quay now from the hotel, and when it drew up, Fallon, counting the pieces and finding one short, flew off the handle like a fussy old lady.

"It's all right," said the imperturbable Luggard, "it's my gun-case; it went on board with the provision boxes. Let's get."

He crossed the gang-plank followed by the other, and leaving him to see to the luggage and the state-rooms, came up on the spar deck from which a splendid view of the harbour could be obtained.

This complicated series of artificial docks filled with the waters of the La Plata River pleased Luggard even more than the beautiful harbour of Rio.

To his practical mind the evidence of human energy was more fascinating than natural beauty, usefulness of more appeal than loveliness; and yet this true believer in the theory of the Moderns, free, one might think, of the disease of inutility as a crank-shaft, was out on a hunt for old bones in that home of lost species, Patagonia. Fossils, things of deep scientific interest but no practical value at all.

Human nature is full of delightful surprises like this. Biological History, or, if one may use the term, Animal Archæology, was the passion of this man's life whom Nature had designed to be a leader in the world of affairs; the science of all others most remote from the affairs of men and the practice of life.

Holding a professorship at Yorktown and with sufficient money of his own to be independent of grants, he had organised this two-man expedition with the care and particularity of a scientific operation, securing everything of the best, from his assistant Fallon, one of the leaders of Schofer's African Expedition, to the covered waggon, guns and provisions now stowed in the hold of the Tagus.

The gangways were going now and the shore fasts; the syren lifted echoes from the town and river and the big steamer with the pilot on the bridge drew out from Quay No. 6 to breast the blaze of morning light which was the La Plata.

II.

Patagonia has a beach a thousand miles long, a thousand miles of the same old beach, unless where a bluff breaks the sea; the same desolation; the same far flat hinterland unless where a bluff breaks the sky; the same sun-blaze and silence and absence of human life except where a flat-topped town of a few houses cries across the water, "Here is Desolation!" Yet through it all, unseen as a thought, lies the thread of the electric telegraph line connecting civilisation with the Straits of Magellan.

Patagonia is the great flat land, it seems flattened out by the wind eternally blowing from Cape Horn; true pampas, spread here and there with Malaspina and red-wood bushes and scant grass marked, out of the cattle and sheep districts, with little in the way of life but the shadow of the passing bird and far away—always far away, a fleet-footed herd of guanacos.

They passed Bahia de St. Matina, Pena de San José, that great hammer-head of land hiding the new gulf, and Cap Blanco, reaching the long beach where stands San Julian, a strew of galvanised-iron houses fronting the shore where hides were piled in bales ready for shipment.

They were landed here, stores, waggon and all in lighters, and the Tagus, having taken on the hides, steered south for Port Santa Cruz.

"Heavens," said Fallon that evening as they took a walk on the beach between the desolate town and the desolate sea, "if loneliness lives anywhere she lives here—we've knocked at her door and found her in. It's that town and that hill."

He was referring to a hill far to the north that you can see from the beach of San Julian, a hill shaped exactly like a pyramid.

"What's the matter with the town?" asked Luggard.

"Oh, I don't know," replied the other, "but if it was away the place wouldn't be nearly so desolate, seems to me—it's the psychological effect."

"Which means fancy," said Luggard.

It seemed strange to him that a man like Fallon, used to exploration and the wilds, should indulge in whimsies like this. As for himself, he was iron to such impressions; that sort of thing was all right for women. It cast the shadow of a doubt on the virility of Fallon, but he said nothing.

III.

From San Julian, having obtained, by luck, two good horses for the waggon, they struck west across the great plains with the Rio Chico to the south of them and the Rio de Bayos to the north, and the Cordilleras hidden beyond the horizon to the west.

The Patagonian coast has been long known as a hunting ground for fossil remains, the bones of the small horses, the pyrotherium and the earlier South American animals, to say nothing of fossil woods; but from information which he had received Luggard was leaving the coast to itself and striking far inland. It was after rain, there was grass here and there, poor enough but sufficient, with the corn they carried, for the horses, and there were water-holes and small tributaries of the Rio Chico, so they would not want for water.

They were not hurried. Here in this land of vast spaces where the only thing that told of time was the sun, they made no more than twenty miles a day, sometime far less, whilst to north, south, east and west the pampas carried the eye to nothing but the ring of the horizon unbroken by tree or sign of life except for an occasional far herd of guanacos, always moving as if pursued and vanishing almost as soon as sighted.

Fallon, who had talked of loneliness at San Julian, thought nothing of it here. He was the geologist, wise in recognising the clays and strata where their quarry might be found, with no eye for anything but indications.

He surveyed the ground and the land around them as a gold prospector might have done regardless of all else, a silent man when at work and at night too tired for much talk.

They passed Indian burial-mounds which they left untouched, explored the ground dips and small cañons that occurred here and there, always with poor results, which, however, were better than none.

But the land was changing, and one day Fallon exploring a dip brought to light something like a soup plate; it was a great oyster shell—they had struck Eocene formation. Here, three or four million years ago, had been seashore, here where of all things earthly the sea seemed most remote.

That day, just as land tells of its presence to the sailor by the gulls, far away above them in the blue they saw a condor with a ten-foot stretch of wing, and away to the west a broken white line—its home, the Cordilleras.

On the day following in a cañon which the rains had worked out they found a litopternas skull, a species of the early horse, and on the day following, only a mile away from this find—the skull.

It was in no cañon or dip of ground, it was bedded on the side of a rise; the weather had slowly and, one might almost say, carefully exposed it, and what was visible was only the apex. All other men might have passed it without remark, as the Indians of the plains most certainly had done, but these two at sight of it halted and then gazed at one another in astonishment.

Yet there was nothing remarkable to see, nothing but a convex white surface a foot or so in diameter like part of a bedded mushroom.

Fallon got down on his knees beside it and began carefully to test the soil at its edges; it was friable, but how hard the deeper soil might be it was impossible to say. One thing clearly stood out, the skull, judging by the part exposed, was monstrous in size; this was just a table of it. Elephant? Fallon, who had unearthed elephants from the Fâyum desert in Africa, knew at once that this was something different from the largest beasts known to man, so did Luggard.

Luggard's mind instantaneously reviewed everything—all known forms with which he was acquainted, which, indeed, included all known forms, and, judging from the whole by the sample exposed, he knew that he was confronting the unknown.

The removal of the friable earth for a few inches gave scarcely any dip; judging by what there was they came to the conclusion that the digging out would take them a week at least. It all depended on the state of the bone and its fragility, which had to be carefully tested. If the fossilisation had not penetrated through the whole depth, varnish would have to be applied and the whole thing carefully bandaged to stand shipment.

They turned from it and began preparations for a long halt.

To make the waggon a more comfortable sleeping-place at night, they removed the stores, placing them in a pot-hole close to the mound, and covering them with a spare tarpaulin; they took the harness from the horses, gave them a feed of corn and tethered them with twenty-foot lengths of rope so that they could graze from the scant grass patches round about. There was no trouble about water; they had passed a source less than a quarter of a mile back to which the horses could be led, and they had with them a breaker which could be filled as wanted.

This done, in the few hours of daylight remaining, they set to work on the skull. Whilst Luggard with a tiny drill and gouge tested the bone to see its condition as to fragility, finding it fairly solid, Fallon scraping like an armadillo and with the instinct of a dog near the base of the mound unearthed a gigantic neck vertebra, an indication that the whole monstrous skeleton would be found when sought for.

They knocked off work just before sundown.

Luggard standing up, looked around him from horizon to horizon.

Illustration: "The waggon was lifted bodily and flung twenty yards.... Something sped by them like a broken umbrella blown away by the hurricane; it was a rhea almost as big as an ostrich, blown like thistledown."

IV.

The pampas lay golden and still in the last rays of the sun, the red-wood and scrub bushes casting long shadows, and, away to the west, the Cordilleras showed more clearly than ever seen before.

The ever-blowing wind had absolutely ceased. It was this that made Luggard look around him from skyline to skyline with a questioning eye as though he had suddenly lost something.

The wind was gone.

The wind is part of the pampas; blowing a full gale or a zephyr, it is always there, talking or whispering or shouting; driving the snow on the rain, or simply playing with the twigs of the red-wood or the leaves of the callifate.

"Dead calm," said Fallon. He struck a match to light his pipe and the flame burned without showing a flicker, then, as he flung the match away he shaded his eyes, looking to where a flock of birds showed to the west suddenly developed against the crystal blue of the sky.

The birds were coming towards them, moving high and with speed. It was a vast flock, a long-drawn vibrating cloud, and now as it passed overhead came the winnowing sound of the wings that died away as the flock passed eastward and towards the sea.

Illustration: "They could neither speak nor move."

"Going strong, aren't they?" said Fallon.

He set about preparing the supper, then an hour later, having taken a look at the horses, they turned in.

A little after midnight Luggard awoke to a sound like the far-off drumming of rain on canvas. He listened for a moment, then slipping from under the waggon tent, he came out.

The pampas lay under the light of the moon, still not a breath of wind or stir of bush, only the drumming of the rain which turned into a drumming of hoofs and—there they were, a herd of guanacos coming as if straight for the camp and as if driven by the fiend.

Fallon, awakened, now slipped out and they ran to quiet the horses neighing and backing from their tethers whilst the herd, fifty if one, passed as though following a ruled line and scarcely swerving from the presence of the humans.

"Pesky fools," said Fallon.

They returned to the waggon, fell asleep and awoke at sunrise. The horses had broken tether and were gone. Clean gone and not a speck of them to be seen. They must have broken tether hours ago, and there was nothing to be done but wait and trust in the chance of their return.

The wind had come back, blowing from a cloudless sky and as if from the mouth of the great sun that had broken above the skyline.

It was a hot wind, steadily and rapidly increasing in weight, gusting so that the waggon-cover flapped and strained to it, and Fallon, who was cleaning up after breakfast, had a tin plate blown from his hand a distance of yards.

"Hell of a wind," said Fallon. "It's blowing half a gale, and I believe it's coming stronger; no use working in a tear like this."

"Oh, I think it's all right," said Luggard, looking into the clear sky of the east under his hand. "I reckon it will drop soon."

But he was wrong. It increased.

It had lost its gusty nature and settled to a steady drive, a full gale now out of a clear sky and beneath a merrily shining sun.

They stood with their backs to the leeward of the waggon and then shifted, lying down to the leeward of the mound. They were afraid the waggon would be upset and they could not take in the cover. It was impossible to handle the canvas in a blow like this.

"Those guanacos were running for shelter last night," shouted Fallon. "Hope it's not coming on worse."

It was.

Crying like a hawk, filling the sky with cries and what seemed the echoes of cries, it grew till the waggon was lifted bodily and flung twenty yards, shattered to match-wood, and the canvas-tilt, blown sky-high, sailed away like a parachute carried miles and miles to who knows where.

And still the wind grew with a steady rumble from the east above the wild crying, till it seemed that the whole land from Tierra del Fuego was being rolled up and was coming on them with the sea behind it.

They could neither speak nor move. Something sped by them like a broken umbrella, blown away by the hurricane; it was a rhea almost as big as an ostrich, blown like thistledown.

V.

"It's stopped."

Luggard was speaking; the great blow was over and he was raising himself on his elbow.

Over, though the wind was still a thirty-mile-an-hour wind, though dropping.

They rose up.

The skull was unharmed. Coming to the pot-hole where the provisions were stored, they found everything right and not a case disturbed. The iron pressure of the wind had kept them down.

But the waggon had vanished—or as good as vanished. An axle, a wheel, splinters of wood—nothing more.

"The devil!" said Luggard.

They were a hundred and fifty miles from the coast, waggon; gone, horses gone—cut off. Yet neither man was thinking of himself so much as of the skull, and the bones belonging to it still surely to be found.

They would have to go back to San Julian to get a waggon; that fact stood before them square as a tower. But these practical men did not waste time or words lamenting; the Patagonian wind had played them a dirty trick, but it had at least spared the provisions, also the pick and shovel which were heavy and had given it little grip, and the guns.

They did not even bother to hunt for the horses; not only was the waggon gone, but the corn,

"There's no use in us both going back," said Fallon, "you'd better stick here and get on with the digging out, and I'll hoof it for San Julian. I ought to get there in ten days. I'll take grub for a week and my compass and the 12-bore, and I reckon I know the trail well enough to strike the water places."

They scratched round hunting out things here and there that the wind had left untouched or blown into odd corners of the ground; a hairbrush, a safety-razor and a penknife they recovered in this way with other things, and then they set to work arranging for Fallon's departure.

It was strange, that, having to end their companionship all at once and at the point of the pistol, so to speak, even though the separation would be only temporary—yet how much of eternity has that word "temporary" been made to cover in the everyday speech of pan!

One of the big water-bottles, holding two quarts, he took with him, and food enough for a week.

"I reckon I can get armadillos," said he, "and birds if I run short of grub—which I won't, and there are water-holes in plenty."

"Luck!" said Luggard.

Fallon took the trail they had come by; it was a distinct trail, a water-source trail made by the guanacos during, maybe, ten thousand years, maybe thirty. He kept to it, Luggard watching him.

He did not watch long. This man of iron and will had no inclination for speculations or musings, and Fallon out of gunshot was dead to him till Fallon's return.

He turned to the business in hand.

The great blow had not hurt the skull. A wind capable of dismasting a ship is utterly disarmed by a bald man's head; the skull that for æons had been covered and whose dome had been partly exposed during perhaps twenty years was there waiting to be worked upon, and Luggard, forgetting the other, set to on his job.

I have said that Luggard had found the exposed part of the skull to be filtrated and therefore solid, and had concluded that the sample was significant of the mass. Before sunset that day he proved himself wrong. The deeper portions of the bone now exposed proved unfiltrated and therefore easily broken.

This was a blow. His employment was gone.

As he cooked his supper, and afterwards as he lay on his elbow smoking his pipe, he measured the full meaning of it. There was no use in going on with the work till Fallon came back. To expose the whole skull as he had intended would be to expose it to destruction, every section as exposed would have to be treated with shellac. He had none. The whole thing would have to be bandaged for protection. He had nothing to bandage it with, the wind that had left him the pick and the shovel had taken the shellac and the linen. Nature, when she gets man alone to play with, acts very often like this, as a cat with a mouse.

But Luggard was not a mouse, he was a man. This opening pat of the paw left him quite unmoved. It was so, and bothering would not make it otherwise. He hoped that Fallon would bring back with him enough shellac and linen on the off-chance that the great skull would prove to be unfiltrated in some of its parts, and resting on that hope he fell asleep, lying there in the open with his face buried in the crook of his arm, for shelter he had none, nothing but a piece of tarpaulin saved from the wreckage and which did him instead of a blanket.

He awoke after sunrise.

Just in that moment when the sun has all but freed himself from the horizon, the pampas, in weather like this, is a golden and a wonderful and a living thing; comfortable as the light of a fire, the light of the sun destroys desolation and the bleakness of distance and almost the sense of loneliness.

Luggard had a month before him, perhaps more, to be lived out in this place. Here on the pampas he had to face Nature and Time without a companion and without a roof to cover him, and—at first sight, without an occupation to engage his mind.

It was as though Nature had laid a trap for a civilised man to destroy him, taking him from all that constitutes civilisation and choosing for her first weapon loneliness.

But she had chosen a tough subject. This man, absolutely without fear and filled with resources of interest, cared nothing for loneliness.

All the same, he was cunning. He saw the great blank space of time before him, a desert in which there was only one danger, so he thought—want of occupation.

Sitting there on the bank-side beside the skull, whilst the sun rose higher in the sky, he at once began to plot and plan the various occupations and pursuits to fill the days and the weeks before him.

First hunting. He determined to rely as little as possible on the provisions in the cache. Besides the other things recovered from the wreckage of the waggon he had his rifle and ammunition. There were guanacos to be stalked, and armadillos and small animals to be had for the taking. Then there was the cooking and preparing meals three times a day; the careful search of the ground all to northward for stray things and bits of the destroyed waggon; the prospecting for more fossils in every direction; the erection of a cairn on top of the mound near the skull so that he would have a landmark in his wanderings in search of game or bones—oh, there were lots of things to be done, varied occupations that would fill a month or more, and for relaxation at night he had his own mind, active and stored with treasure.

So far from fearing the prospect before him, he was filled with a new sense of freedom and release from the little things of life. He was swimming all alone, filled with the joy of his own strength and individuality, king of his own world—and that feeling was no illusion. He had never before been really alone with himself, and his brain in this new freedom was like an athlete stripped for a race and free of the worry of clothes.

It had been his habit to amuse himself with mathematical problems. He was a bad arithmetician, but he had a feeling for the higher mathematics and the speculations of Einstein had interested him more than a little.

To-night, after supper and smoking his pipe, Patagonia and the visible universe was forgotten. He had seized at last a problem that had eluded him.

All mathematical figures are finite. You cannot expand a triangle indefinitely in space because the straight lines forming it cannot be infinite in length: they must meet to form angles. For this reason the triangle is an imperfect figure since it is incapable of being expanded indefinitely. Where lies the imperfection? There is nothing to the thing but lines, the imperfection must be in the lines and must be want of straightness. They are not ideally straight, and the only possible imperfection affecting all parts of all straight lines equally must be curvature. The ideal straight line, that is to say, the shortest distance, between two points must be curved, and of course equally curved, for any inequality would lengthen the distance.

It must, in fact, be the segment of a circle, and of the greatest circle possible to be described in space since the curve in it cannot be reduced.

Now comes the intriguing part of this idea.

The circumference of this absolute circle is the ultimate measure of distance. There can be no distance greater than the "length" of this circumference. Distance, therefore, has a limit which cannot be exceeded. A man starting from any point in space and moving forward in an ideally straight line towards another point must come back at last to the point of departure.

In other words, Space, whilst being possibly infinite in itself, is finite relative to every point of itself.

Einstein's curvature exists not as an attribute of space but of distance.

Luggard, playing with this idea, fell asleep.

Next day besides his camp duties, such as cooking and cleaning up, he began the systematic survey of the ground to the north in search of wreckage blown away by the wind. He found numerous small articles stuck in bushes and lying in hollows and cracks of the ground.

He worked slowly and marked the area that he had covered, and calculated that the whole possible area would take a week of search. But he knew the value of change of occupation, and next day he left this business entirely and began the hunt for fossils, discovering a few small bones, enough to give promise of more and to lend interest to the work.

Of nights he would fall back on small mathematical problems and the library of a well-stored mind. He was quite happy and content without any unpleasant sense of loneliness and capable of carrying on as he was for an indefinite time, or so it seemed to him.

VI.

All the same and after awhile, maybe a week or more, Luggard's peace of mind began to be troubled by something on which he could not put a finger. A sort of vague melancholy that seemed born of a want, a discontent caused by what?

Isolation? No.

He had thought of that and had fortified himself against it by plotting out all sorts of various employments, fortifying, really, the strongest part of his character.

He could stand isolation to any amount.

Boredom? No, he was fully interested in all his little affairs.

The monotonous scenery around him? No. The pampas, though steadfast in its outlines, was always changing to the different lights of day, and anyhow he was not a man to be affected by surroundings.

Knocking off his other work he would start for long walks, miles and miles across the pampas always sure, in that clear air, of keeping in sight the cairn he had raised on the mound for a landmark.

Tired out at night he would sleep soundly for a few hours and then awake gasping from want of air owing to the fact that half unconsciously and half waking from sleep he had drawn the tarpaulin over his head, then lying awake he would gaze at the stars or the distance around him, half torpid and with the strangest feeling as though he were losing his individuality.

Nature, whom he had made light of and against whom he was so well equipped, had got him at last. Her storms, desolation and loneliness could not touch him, yet her presence was beginning to tell. For against it he had no roof or walls to shelter him.

No man can live long in her presence without a hole of some sort to hide himself in from her ceaseless stare. In the great flat land he had neither house nor hut nor tent nor cave, not even a hole in the ground.

The tarpaulin was no use; not only did it half smother him, but it was too close to his face, too thin. The sky pressed right on top of it.

And he had nothing with which to build a hiding-place to keep the sky and the distance away from him.

Like a bottle of wine uncorked he was evaporating, and the knowledge came to him at last mixed with a vague dread such as he had never experienced before.

His mind, still powerful, recognised the position and fought it. It was absurd, the sort of thing that might happen to Fallon, not to him. It was a phase and would fade out; still, and all the same, it would be well to try if possible to devise some sort of habitation.

He did not know that what he was fighting was not a fancy but a necessity great as the necessity for water.

He spent a day trying to dig into the bank where the skull was, to make a cave of some sort. Useless, he had nothing to shore up the roof and sides with: the thing crumbled in. He was defeated, but so weary with the work that he scarcely cared. He slept well that night till before dawn, when a nightmare whose dream was the problem about the triangle and the limitation of distance, which we already know, aroused him to the fact that he was still without a shelter from the sky and the distances around him.

He sat watching the dawn come.

This tremendous business had little to do with the thing we know of as dawn and which can be seen from a bedroom window.

Here doors of darkness a thousand miles high were slowly turning to doors of crystal. More, the vast business was being directed and worked from no common centre. Stars were taking themselves away, a cloud in the east was turning itself to ether, the Cordilleras in the west were lifting their snows into the light, and from all this tremendous work not a sound. Then the sun rose, lighting the world from Cape Horn to Panama and beyond, and he bit on the bullet and turned his back to the sun and watched the Cordilleras white against the distant blue.

It was an old tin plate he was cleaning after an heroically constructed and eaten breakfast that took him in hand and talked to him as he had never been talked to before:

"You can't stick it any longer here, you are tethered by that cache and the skull, you must hike for San Julian if you can get there. Your mind is being sucked away from you. You've got to get under cover, got to make for cover. You can't fight this thing and you are a fool to think you can. Soon you'll be mad, scratching for a hole like an armadillo—the whole thing is, maybe, only a fancy, but there it is."

Yes. That was the truth—yet all the same he fought it, to be influenced by a fancy why that would bring him to the same level as Fallon.

Unconsciously he had been criticising Fallon from the first, cruelly yet not unkindly. That was Luggard's way, the way of the scientific mind. So would he have dissected a frog. Fallon was temperamental, the best of good fellows, but reacting to environment like a woman or like a barometer to weather. Luggard had been through the alkali hell of Death Valley unmoved, yet here in this comparative heaven not only was he moved but shaken to the foundations of his being.

And the thing was absurd from the material point of view. He had air, food, water, freedom and occupation; he did not require shelter against the weather, which was fine—he required nothing but shelter against the sky. And that, of course, was pure fancy, for the sky could not harm him materially.

He said to himself: "This thing is most curious. It is a thing to be studied and so overcome. Without any manner of doubt I am suffering from the effect of the roof habit. Since the time of the worms Life has been accustomed to dig itself in against the weather and enemies. The tree-men had a roof of leaves, the cave-men the roof of a cave, the tent-dwellers their tents; there is no tribe so savage that it has not evolved a hut or hiding-place; and without any doubt I am suffering from the old stain of the mind coupled with the fact that I am tethered to this spot.

"Herds and primitive men on the march would not worry about a shelter, and I believe if I broke from here and started on the march to San Julian this thing would lift—all these instincts are not things of yesterday, but deep-rooted in old times.

"I will write a thesis on this. Let us test the theory."

He went and collected provisions from the store, took his gun and ammunition, made sure he had his compass, filled his water-bottle at the source and started east.

The first step was like a step out of a closed circle into freedom. A mile from the fatal spot the worry had lifted; he was going somewhere, marching with the hundred million primitive men, his ancestors, who on their great migrations and hunts never worried about the shelter of a cave or a hut. And he could not turn back with all those tribes behind him, on either side and leading him.

That night he slept the sleep of the dead-tired beside a red-wood bush, not worrying about any shelter, and later, within a day's march of San Julian, bronzed, footsore, half starved, yet sane, he met Fallon and the waggon which Fallon had gone to fetch.

But he did not go back with the other. He lied and made excuses rather than confess that he feared to see again the battle-ground where his will had been broken.

He sent Fallon to collect the skull, which, incidentally, Fallon failed to find.

Neither did he write his thesis—but he has permitted me, whilst suppressing his real name, to write this story as a warning to all who would go counter to the ancestral instincts which are the basis of the mentality of Man.

Copyright, 1927, by H. de Vere Stacpoole, in the United States of America.