making certain that the lion was dead, Coningsby went and knelt by the side of the porter. As he knelt there, silent in the terrible solitude, Jerold Wharton came upon him.
"He was my favorite carrier," said Coningsby simply.
"And you arrived too late," Wharton had declared without any trace of emotion.
"Perhaps," was the calm reply, "but I lessened his agony by a fraction." As he spoke he turned the poor fellow over on his back and showed a bullet wound which was clotted with sickening blood.
"I did not shoot to kill the lion," said Coningsby, and there the matter had ended.
When news of the incident filtered back to civilization, Coningsby had been severely criticized by many. But probably no one summed up the matter so well as did Jerold Wharton.
"To judge of a man's actions in the jungle," he had declared curtly, "one must live in the jungle."
Now as Arthur Coningsby lay, racked by a terrible fever, all this flamed out in his mind in startling vividness. Fever sometimes dulls a man's faculties but it often intensifies his memory. Thus was its affect upon Coningsby. As he thought of these things a great longing to hold the old gun in his hands once again overcame him. With a half-audible groan of pain, he turned to ring for his man-servant and gazed full into the face of Olga Fullerton.
For a moment he gazed at her speechless, then he slowly closed his eyes.
