Tiger Lure

by T. S. Stribling

 

Tiger Lure

BY T. S. STRIBLING

A Complete Novelette

THE United Rubber Company has a post at Taos, a structure in old Spanish mission style built of cemented shells. It was once a mission, I believe, then a fort and now a post. It stands naked in a furnace of sunshine in the center of what the mestizos are pleased to call their plaza; that is a space of ground some fifty yards wide beaten perfectly bare and hard by naked feet instead of beaten dusty by shod ones. Beyond the plaza the jungle sets in like the hair on a woman's head, glossy, lush and fragrant.

On the down-river side of the post is an arcade that used to be a cloister, but now the natives rent little trading stalls between the columns and this forms the village market. An odor of stale fish, onions, shrimp and chilli pervades the plaza, yet somehow it is not so very disagreeable. It is a kind of scraped-clean, dried-out smell that one meets anywhere in Venezuela.

Only three persons were in sight when I piled my traps off the bolunga. A ponderous Chinese in a flapping shirt concocted chilli in one of the stalls. Near him his brown Arawak wife stretched like a cat on some bags of beans; the girl's hips were nearly vertical while her torso was twisted to a horizontal with the svelt flexibility of youth. The celestial understood, perhaps, a dozen words of her Arawak. She was part of his furniture, a little more or a little less dear than his pipe.

The third person in the plaza was a half-breed called Jesu Diabolo, although that could hardly have been his name. The first thing one noticed about Jesu was his one good eye, and a dirty bluish flap over the shrunken socket of the other. This flap he evidently meant to accord in color with his single pale protruding ball. It produced a queer effect, that pale eye against his leather-colored face gleaming at me from the shadow of his sombrero. Add to this bow legs and the wide black mustache of a ranchero and there stands Jesu Diabolo insultingly to the life.

When he saw my traps put out of the bolunga, he loitered down, inspecting them with his one eye, then he shifted it to my khaki, evidently trying to connect me with my baggage. He removed his sombrero with a grace of which no misfortune deprives a South American.

"Pardon, señor, do you sell traps?" he inquired in Spanish.

I shook my head.

"Señor Americano is not a trapper himself?" he asked in surprize.

"I trap birds," I replied in his tongue.

"Then we are brothers, señor." He swept his broad hat in a bow so low that his bluish flap hung perpendicularly from his swart face. "I am a fur-trapper and a trader. I compose an animal scent, señor, absolute kill—" these two words he said in English with a show of pride—"and if I could serve you——"

I followed his smooth Spanish with aversion. At that first sight there was something so repellent about Jesu Diabolo that I felt a nervous impatience to be rid of the fellow as quickly BS possible.

"If you would direct me to the alcalde," I suggested, "it would be more than I can repay."

Jesu Diabolo indicated the old mission with another sweep and bow and, to my distaste, preceded me.

The alcalde was a small dapper man who sat dozing at a baized table in the cool dark interior of the mission. The place was a hotchpotch. Near the desk in a small cabinet was the officina correos, or that is, the Taos post-office. Big pear-shaped balls of caoutchouc heaped in one end of the room was the warehouse of the rubber company. On the desk before the mayor were some yellow blanks which represented the company's office. Here and there were a few writs and summonses which he used in his civil capacity. On top of this litter, a carafe of water, a flask of spirits, some oranges and a battered guitar garnished the alcalde's desk.

The man himself proved a very friendly and a very curious little body. In answer to a string of brisk questions, I told my name and business, offered my passport and inquired for lodgings with a family who could speak English.

The alcalde picked up a cigaret stub from the edge of the table.

"The only linguist in Taos is Señor Monan."

Jesu Diabolo who had picked up the guitar and touched its strings, now muted them abruptly.

"You do not fancy Señor Monan would accept a lodger?" he commented.

The alcalde seemed amused:

"All Señor LeFever can do is to try, is it not, Jesu? Señor Monan's hacienda seems to encourage perseverance, eh?"

He winked at me to mark some unknown joke, took a last puff at his cigaret, tossed awav the stub and laughed.

"You will waste your time, señor," discouraged Jesu, shifting his one good eye to me.

The alcalde reached for pen and paper.

"I'll write a little note of introduction. It may help. You present this, Señor LeFever."

He blotted, folded and handed it to me.

Jesu plainly disapproved, but he took himself off the corner of the table, slung the guitar cord around his neck and indicated a willingness to direct me to Señor Monan's. We left the alcalde preparing a drink with his liquor and oranges and smiling to himself.

As we stepped from the gloomy interior, the intense sunshine dazzled my eyes. Heat reflected from the plaza "filtered through my khaki with a feeling of vermiculation. It was the hour of siesta and everything in the square slept. The lithe Arawak woman lay motionless, face down on the beans; her ponderous Chinese owner sat supine amid his pots and blinked at her through dozing eyes. On the side of the wall a green lizard slept in an ecstacy of heat. In this land of ascians, we trod on our shadows, splotches of ultramarine, which dyed our feet and legs in its color.

Jesu lead the way, his bare soles made no sound on the hard paths that meandered from hut to hut in the jungle. We passed perhaps a dozen thatched cabins. Here and there a dog or a child slept. Of all Taos, only we two moved.

THE half-breed talked at first, but presently swung his guitar about and began strumming its strings. From simple chords he evolved a plaintive melody that presently shaded off into the beat and insistence of negroid music; then he embroidered his theme with Spanish flourish and bolero. His aria, I think, suggested words, for he began singing softly at first; then after a phrase or two, his voice arose to a silver power that astonished me. He appeared to forget that I followed.

A fancy came to me that perhaps he was singing so loudly and so passionately to reach the ears of some sleeping girl in one of the huts. The music distressed me; it was too suggestive, too lickerish to be sung by one man in the presence of another. It gave my distaste for the fellow a greasy flavor.

After a while the song stopped suddenly. We had come to an open space in the rank vegetation and now Jesu swung his guitar out of the way and stepped aside to let me pass.

"Señor Monan lives yonder," he pointed toward a copse of palms. "You will see his house when you pass into the cleared space." He looked at me queerly, then added, "I hope, señor, you catch your bird."

I paused, hardly knowing whether to offer pay or not. When I made a slight movement toward my pocket he stiffened visibly, and I let it pass. I thanked him briefly, ungraciously, perhaps, glad to be rid of him. Jesu, like his song, was too chromatic for a white man's taste.

I moved into the open field with a relieved feeling and paused to look at Señor Monan's house. It was a sprawling sequence of adobes, sun-washed, with walls punctured here and there by narrow barred windows. The field around about was planted with aisles of moriche palms, which furnish the natives with wine, bread, rope, cloth, what not.

As I stood observing my prospective lodgings a queer thing happened. I heard an insect-like drone and something tipped my sun-helmet. I reached up to brush away some beetle or other and discovered a little nick in the rim of my helmet. I removed the hat and looked at the place, puzzled.

I still stood with mv finger in the nick when in the distance Diabolo began singing again. I listened and looked until his voice faded to nothing and the vast silence of the siesta once more comprehended Taos. Then I walked down a wide palm aisle toward the adobe.

When I pulled the bronze lion's foot in Señor Monan's iron-grilled door, a gong clashed inside and lost itself in a vibrating hum. After a period of lifelessness, came a shuffling approach from the inside and the clatter of bars lowered. Then a panel in the heavy door slid back and discovered an ancient shriveled negress with a huge key which she applied to a corresponding section of the grille.

As she opened it, I drew out the alcalde's note to her master. To my surprize she did not even glance at me or my letter, but began exerting her feeble strength to reclose the iron bars, Apparently her duty began and ended with the opening and shutting of the panels. I stepped inside with a queer sense of swinging aboard a passing train. Even then the ancient appeared not to observe my entrance, which brushed her dirty skirt, but continued automatically relocking the bars.

For a moment I watched her and then turned to my surroundings. The hall was large, cool and poverty-stricken, with time-stained touches here and there reminiscent of luxury. A portière of faded silk half curtained one end of the passage; a painting in a tarnished gilt frame hung from the wall. A rose jar with fresh roses perfumed the passage and suggested a woman. Two silver-chased dueling swords crossed above a door which I guessed led into some ancient Salle des Armes.

This last surmise was verified by a man stepping out from under the weapons holding in his hands a carbine which he appeared to be cleaning. He was a thin nervous man with a worn-out face in which burned inquisitorial eyes. For a moment he regarded me with an embarrassing scrutiny. I held out my note a little awkwardly, I am afraid, and began an explanation in English. I told him I wanted to trap birds in Taos for an ornithological institution and that I had been directed to him as the only English-speaking citizen in Taos.

The señor smiled dryly, then deprecated accepting a guest in what he called his poverty-stricken ruins. He used English without accent, but with that rigid grammatical structure noticeable among cultivated foreigners.

I insisted that his thick adobe walls would be a great boon to a man from Northern latitudes if he could spare me a room.

He interrupted with a gesture. It was not lack of rooms. He could offer me a suite of rooms, but—he paused with some serious objection, I believe, on his lips, but finally turned it into a fear that I would find time dull on my hands among his sprawling adobes. I assured him I had not come to Venezuela for distraction; then our conversation drifted to birds, and finally he asked me how I had found my way to the hacienda. I told him a half-breed called Jesu Diabolo had guided me.

For some reason this seemed to allay a faint suspicion of me that still lingered in the back of my host's mind. He nodded.

"Yes, I heard Jesu Diabolo singing when you entered my clearing, and from this distance I thought you were he. However, as you did not dodge back into the jungle, I knew I was mistaken."

"When I did not dodge back?" I accented, mystified.

"When you did not dodge back," returned the don noncommitally.

He replaced the carbine in a stand of arras. A barred window just above the stand was as narrow as a loop-hole. As he put back, the firearm, I observed a Maxim silencer affixed to the carbine's muzzle.

Then a tentative and ghastly connection played through my mind between the fact that Jesu had some cause to dodge and the silencer and the droning buzz that had nicked my helmet. I looked at Señor Monan. curiously but found a difficulty in opening the topic. A moment later he led the way for me to make choice of what rooms I would occupy.

II

I HAVE no object in making of Señor Monan a mystery, although for several days he was a mystery to me. But no man, I take it, can remain permanently without a confidant. Men have been gregarious for too many millions of years; he has communicated his thoughts and emotions for too many epochs for any individual in this era of grace to place a seal upon his heart.

During the evenings, Señor Monan and I played at cribbage or dominoes and sometimes his daughter L'wanna sat in our games or made lace near us at another table. Very slowly the señor began to unfold himself, a little bit at a time, until within perhaps a week of evenings, I discovered why he had hesitated to receive me into his home—an extraordinary thing amid the uniform hospitality of Venezuela.

Señor Monan was implicated in some sort of political trouble in Caracas, an emeute, an uprising, I never understood the details. His followers had lost, and now any day he was expecting arrest and a long imprisonment or even severer punishment. I had known that Venezuela was one of the most unquiet of South American states, but it seemed odd in this somnolent village to find an insurrectionist. Before this fiasco, it seemed, he once held a consulship to England. Now he confined himself to this plantation of moriche walks which belonged to a friend in Caracas and where he hoped to escape suspicion and elude arrest.

The señor explained all this with the detachment Of a third person, but L'wanna, after the manner of weeping girls, wiped her black eyes on the least possible corner of her handkerchief that would serve, then silently went on with her lace-making.

At other times I saw L'wanna in the patio snipping roses for her jar or trying to make friends with the butterflies. An endless variety of these insects floated over the adobe into the flower plot; heliconias, silver-wings, and half a dozen other species I did not know. Once I saw her persuade a brilliant blue Morphos to poise on the tip of her finger and suck a drop of honey.

She was but a child on the dewy side of sixteen, and her face! Sometimes I think Catholic mothers, when praying to the Holy Virgin with their tiny ones asleep beneath their hearts—I think, may be, the grace of Our Lady of Sorrows must be kissed upon those dawning features. I don't know, but standing in my window, I have laid down the snares and gins of my profession and tried to explain so vivid and so pure a loveliness.

The avi-fauna of Venezuela opened a larger field to me than I had expected. It contains fifty-odd species of humming-birds alone. One day as I was constructing some close-meshed cages to receive my catch of these exquisite little creatures, Señor Monan and L'wanna came into my workshop.

The girl watched me curiously and finally asked me how I caught the birds. I explained the different traps, snares, limes and nooses. As she considered each article, she pressed her full lips together and with a little shudder declared that they reminded her of the racks and thumbscrews and pillories in the museum at Caracas and that she would look at them no more.

She would have left the room, but her father reminded her that she was my hostess and I her guest. She remained a few moments longer, looking about my shop with such an air of repressed horror that it embarrassed me in my work. Finally she made some excuse and went out into the patio.

Señor Monan was distressed over the slight occurrence.

"I suppose I am to blame for it," he told me. "When L'wanna was a tiny thing, she wanted a bird and a cage. I explained to her the cruelty—I mean the cruelly it would have been for pleasure," he corrected tactfully, "not cruelty for scientific purposes. I suppose she remembers it." Then he added, "Her great grandfather on my mother's side was Simon Bolivar. Somehow our family have never been able to endure prisons or prisoners."

With the completion of the cages I began collecting specimens. A remarkable trapping-ground lay before me in the jungle around Señor Mohan's palm walks. Birds were everywhere. They ranger! from little tyrant fly-catchers that snapped mosquitoes along the pathside to flocks of flamingoes moving in a red line against the green wall of the distant jungle. Yellow cassiques and lavender jays glinted among the palm crests; macaws, toucans, parakeets screamed through the forest. Yet with this fullness of life I was strangely unfortunate.

I laid a course of traps extending from the Rio Tigre some mile and a half back into the jungle. Twice a day I made the round—in the cool mornings and afternoons. After trapping two days without a specimen, I began to wonder seriously what was wrong with my gins. One morning I reset them very carefully and determined to revisit them at noon notwithstanding the oppressive heat.

SO AFTER luncheon, during siesta, I slipped away from the sleeping household and set out for the river. I was almost to the water's edge when I saw something brilliantly red moving slowly through the undergrowth. I hurried forward as quietly as possible, slipping through lianas, bamboo and saw grass, when I saw through an interstice that it was Jesu Diabolo carrying in his hand the wings of a scarlet ibis. He was just stepping into a native buugo to put out into the river, but at my call he looked about and waited.

When he caught sight of me struggling through the vines he lifted his sombrero. "I was just thinking of you. señor."

"You ought to be," I declared, suddenly understanding the disappearance of my catch.

"How go the birds?" he asked impudently.

"Fast enough," I returned, looking pointedly at the flaming wings in his hands.

"Do you catch a great many?" His assurance made me angrier every moment.

"More than I collect!" I snapped.

"Perhaps something robs your traps, señor," he suggested with composure.

I looked at the fellow wondering how much further he would carry his effrontery.

"What price do you get for ibis wings?" I asked, trying to keep the temper out of my voice.

He glanced negligently at the beauties in his hand.

"Five pesos."

"To me," I said smoothly, "they are worth twenty-five pesos, and a living scarlet ibis is worth a hundred pesos. In the future, my good Jesu, if you will kindly leave my birds in my traps, I'll pay you your five pesos as a bounty or tax or blackmail, whatever you please to call it—but let my birds alone!"

I hardly know what I expected Jesu Diabolo to do, but he surprized me by laughing immoderately until tears dripped down the side of his nose from his one good eye.

"Ah, you American wits!" he gasped. "Such dry jokes! Such droll sayings! I have heard how amusing you were, but I never thought, I n-never d-dreamed——"

He sputtered into laughter again, then presently sobered and continued:

"Unfortunately, señor, it would do you no good to pay me blackmail or tariff or tax. I cut these wings from a bird which I used to bait a camoudie trap." By this time he had become entirely sober and now looked at me with his habitual craft. "Suppose I go around with you. I might suggest something. A skunk or a sloth or a lynx may rob your traps. A tree-trap might stop them."

Now I did not want the fellow with me at all, but that lying amenity which society instills into all of us caused me to stay my steps for him, and we went on together.

As we pushed our way through the steaming undergrowth he told me that for some time he had intended to call upon me.

"It would be agreeable to you," he proceeded delicately, "if I should take the liberty of calling?"

"Charmed," I agreed out of custom.

Diabolo turned to look at me with his one pale eye.

"Will you really admit me, señor?"

"Why—y-yes," I assented in surprize.

"And sav nothing about it?"

"Why not?" I asked still [at a loss.]

"Is it possible you (illegible text) happiness?" cried {{illegible} one in Taos.

"I have (illegible text)

"The (illegible text) away some gnats that gathered about his dirty flap. "Señor Monan fires at me point-blank the moment I appear within range of his mansion. He is an unsocial fellow. Bah!"

The half-breed shrugged his shoulders with Latin carelessness.

With a crawly feeling I recalled the Maxim silencer and the little nick in my helmet. I wondered if on my first day in Taos, Jesu had led me deliberately under fire? I turned and stared at the man's queer face with its detestable bluish flap. It reminded me of a rattlesnake that had moulted everything except an eye-scale.

"Why is Monan so pointed in his discouragement of your society?" I inquired at last.

The Diabolo shrugged again.

"Merely because I tried to steal his daughter, señor, that is all. It is a custom among my mother's people, the Arawaks. We steal our wives. And a fine custom it is, señor, swift, dramatic, the ambush, the sudden rush."

"You—tried to steal L'wanna?" I cried with a slack jaw.

"Such a voice!" exclaimed the half-breed impatiently. "I was not trying to steal a dog or a pig or a bird wing, señor, nothing of value!" he defended sharply.

"But L'wanna!" I cried with a sinking heart. "Why, man, she's but a child!"

"Child!" scoffed Jesu. "Madre de Dios! What would you call a woman—one in the grave? She is sixteen—" He whistled. "She ought to be a grandmother."

There was an ophidian fascination in the half-breed's face as he went on.

"I would be a good husband to the little pantheress, but no—this proud don—no, he is angry if I woo her as the Arawaks, and behold he will not allow me to woo her as Spaniards do. If I sing a song in her hearing, out he jumps with his rifle like a jack-in-the-box! As to talking through the bars of her window, I might as well talk to the stars!" He clenched his slender brown hands in nervous tension. "Unless—unless——"

He bent upon me a pale evil look (illegible text)

(illegible text)

His voice retreated to a dry whisper even in the silence of the sleeping jungle.

IT SUDDENLY struck me, as I I stared at him, that a serpent crawling toward a dove's nest is moved by no immoral impulse. It acts from a simple powerful desire without any complication of conscience. To Jesu Diabolo, obtaining L'wanna was no more a question of morals than plucking a mango. She was difficult to reach, that was all.

Yet queer to say his unmorality filled me with a greater loathing than if he had shown a comprehending contumacy. But he was as innocent as a dagger.

I don't know what—perhaps something about the pallor of my face, my unsteady breathing, suggested to the half-breed that I sympathized with him in his mania. Or perhaps Jesu Diabolo, like Señor Monan, was a lonely man, isolated from his kind by the ridicule of the village. At any rate, through clay-colored lips, the Indian began a molten outpouring in my ear.

"Dios, one mistake, señor, one little mistake and a man regrets it forever. I lie awake all night when the moon is full, thinking of what might be if I only had her, if only I had clung to her when I gripped her in my arms! Oh, she could spit in my face, stab me, burn me with fire——"

Little drops of sweat stood out on Jesu's face and moistened the edge of his bluish flap so that he had to shake off the gnats. His face was gray.

"Señor," he went on, and the force of his heart-beats shook his tones, "when a man loses the greatest quarry of all. he thinks of it forever. He thinks how he might have saved his game, might have won. Over and over I think just how I did it—how I ought to have done it.

"Every night as I lie staring into the moon, I creep again into Señor Monan's house. The señor is gone, but she is there in the patio cutting flowers. Oh, señor, lifting her white arms this way and that! I creep, creep—leap upon her! I grip her in my arms, soft, writhing, a tiger's cub smelling of roses!

"Oh Madre de Dios! I am drunk! I rush for the outside! The old negro woman blocks my way with an ax! Then I make my terrible mistake. I lift an arm to parry the edge. Like a flash she is out of my arms, gone—gone—gone—into a door that locks when it slams, then another, slamming, locking, slamming, locking—no end of rooms in the cursed place!

Sweat poured off Jesu Diabolo. He gripped a tembuse vine and shook it in a fury of despair, crying:

"Fool! Fool! Fool! To lose her in an instant! The old woman could only have split a shoulder or a few ribs——"

As I watched his outburst, never have I felt such violent hatred for any of the spawn of the earth. A furious impulse to murder him seized me. I searched my pockets with shaking fingers. I found my pocket-knife; it was sizable. I had it out. I fumbled open the blade.

Suddenly Jesu, who was looking at me intently, gave a queer laugh. Then he laughed more. He sat down by the tembuse vine and laughed loudly and sardonically.

Quite suddenly he checked his uproar and asked—

"What are you going to trim, señor?"

I made no reply.

"That was an Arawak joke, señor," he explained looking at my knife. "I am half Arawak and half Spanish. This time I jest like the Arawaks about a woman—the woman señor loves, eh?"

He winked his good eye at me with monstrous effect.

I stared at him with hammering heart.

"Did you not jest with me about stealing these wings?" he inquired placidly. "Very funny, very droll. Now I give you my Arawak jest about your woman, eh?" He stood up, shrugged, took a deep breath and said, "Now where are the traps, señor?"

His lie was so absurd, I thought before I killed him, I would show it to him to his teeth.

"Why does Señor Monan fire on you at sight, Jesu Diabolo?" I whipped out.

Jesu opened his single pale eye in astonishment.

"He doss not shoot, Señor LeFever!"

I jerked off my sun-helmet and thrust it into his hands.

"How came that nick in the straw?" I could scarcely keep from leaping on him.

He examined the chipped place with passing interest, ran a finger over the raw edge, then observed carelessly——

"Moths, señor. Camphor and pepper are good."

"That's a bullet-hole from Señor Monan's carbine, Jesu Diabolo!" I cried, growing more angry at his flimsy tissue of lies. "And you did attempt to kidnap L'wanna!"

"How absurd!" defended the half-breed. "He would have the law on me in a moment. Kidnap—why, I should be garroted!"

"The señor has good enough reasons for keeping away from the law," I replied hotly, "or he would have——"

"I know very little of Señor Monan." declared Jesu, "if he is criminal—is he criminal?"

I could have bit my tongue for giving the information. Now I had more incentive than ever to stab him, but for that very reason—it is difficult to explain—because my motives were mixed and so in a way were selfish; because I now had two impulses, one weighing against the other, my vengeance became impossible.

I think Jesu sensed the dilemma goring in my brain, for he whistled a phrase of his detestable song, shrugged his shoulder again and at last made a placating movement and said in a commonplace tone—

"If the señor will show me his snares, I will set my traps and protect him."

I MARVELED at the lightness with which he came back to easy footing. We stood in the edge of a little savanna near a pau d'arco tree in which I had set a number of fine cat-gut snares. The trunk of the giant with its network of vines and shoots formed an easy climb. I indicated a tree, caught hold of a liana and began working my way up through the furry leaves.

Odd to say the last of my snares were unset. I reformed their loops with an irritated thought of monkeys. Below, I Could hear Jesu carelessly jingling his traps or breaking little twigs, awaiting my descent. After a bit he hushed these slight noises. A thought of treachery fluttered through my brain. I maneuvered for an opening in the leaves and peered down.

The half-breed knelt intently studying the choked area around the base of the pau d'arco. As I looked he pressed apart some vines and exhibited a few sticks, a handful of withered flowers fallen from a stalk above and some clods of fresh earth. He lifted one of the sticks which some liana tendril had bound to another in a rude cross and stirred the clay with it. He squatted, studying, stirring, brushing automatically at the gnats around his flap with the ibis wings.

By this time I was descending, not ten feet above his head.

"What is it?" I inquired, looking down suspiciously.

"Nothing, señor," he jingled his traps again.

I swung to the ground and reached the spot he had been examining. With vague distrust, I thrust my toe into the fresh earth and upturned it. There exposed lay the turquoise and ruby body of a peacock heron.

"What sort of scamp are you!" I snapped, out of temper. "You've ruined the feathers. Now it will do neither of us any good!"

"Señor!" the half-breed deprecated my anger.

At that instant a tremendous black beetle with formidable trefoil pincers scuttled out of the disturbed earth with a dry rustling.

"Ah, that explains it, señor, a coroner beetle!" he cried. "Whatever robbed your snares dropped this dead bird and the beetle buried it. A pity to lose it—" he stared at it in a deep reverie—"a great pity—such bright feathers."

With a trapper's instinct to leave no sign, he musingly recovered the body with earth and tossed back the withered blossoms and crossed sticks. He picked up his traps again and began climbing the pau d'arco.

"I'll stop this robber for you, Señor LeFever. Tomorrow you may expect your gins full of birds, and perhaps some minx or monkey will be in my trap. You take your game and I mine, eh? We work well together."

I nodded and Jesu went up as nimbly as a chinchilla. In a short time he came down, wished me luck and took himself off toward the river.

For some reason I had little heart to go further on my rounds. An unwonted depression crept over me. Perhaps it was a nervous reaction after my anger. At any rate I was disgusted with myself and my traps. Indeed, all at once, my very occupation seemed puerile and ridiculous—a [bird-watc]her! What difference between me and the half-breed? He pandered to the vanity of women, and I to the intellectual vanity of men. Both appeared utterly futile. Why this endless, empty study of birds? Did a slowly accumulating catalog of facts lead anywhere? Indeed, did man's whole life and works have any significance at all? The thought stretched out and out.

What excuse had man for all his tremendous pride? What real difference was there between me and Jesu Diabolo and the gaudy heron in the mold, or even the coroner beetle, laying its eggs in the dead meat? Were we not all little vital mechanisms, evolved with prodigal purposelessness by the steaming painted jungle around us?

A prodigious golden note clanged against my ears. It filled the humid air, the endless aisles of the trees and the wide reach of the sky with solemn reverberations. Slowly, argently, came the sound, chime on chime, billows of euphony! It suggested a solemn carillon in gothic spire, a solitary worshiper in the fevered jungle.

The first sound turned me into a keen ornithologist again. I followed the sound, searching everywhere with eyes and ears. For half a mile I stumbled, crawled and climbed; then I saw a sight which set my heart pounding.

On a branch of a Brazil tree perched a snow-white bell-bird, or as the natives call it, the arapunga. This was the eagerly sought object of my whole adventure. I did not disturb the singer, but marked its location. Then with endless labor, I retraced my steps to the pau d'arco, carried all of Jesu's traps to the Brazil tree, set them and spread a thick lime on every limb in my reach. After that I dragged myself home utterly exhausted but filled with a new professional enthusiasm.

III

THA I night, all night long, thoughts of Jesu Diabolo scurried through my brain like rats. I lay in a half sleep. At one moment I could see him creeping upon L'wanna while I sweated, helpless, in the grip of a nightmare. At another time we would stand quarreling furiously whether she were woman or child. Then I would twitch wide awake with the question still in my mind.

Was Señor Monan's daughter a woman? After all, was she—was she? Some profound interest seemed to balance on the answer.

At last in hope of shaking off such fancies I g»t up and walked across the chill tiled floor to the window. From the patio a smell of damp earth and flowers drifted through the bars. Outside in a faint starlight, two lunar moths spiraled monotonously about each other, appearing and vanishing in the gloom of a geranium tree. For several minutes I stood inhaling deeply, hoping to induce sleep when a light glowed in a window across the patio. I blinked at it, wondering sleepily who had lighted it when the shadow of a woman's arm crossed the curtain.

It was odd how that hint of a woman brought me wide awake, alert, in an instant. Indeed, I found myself waiting almost breathlessly for its reappearance.

As I waited, I became sure for no reason in the world that the light came from L'wanna's chamber. A dozen queries beseiged my heart. Was she ill or lonely or unhappy that she arose at such an hour? Did the languid night tease her into restlessness as it did me? Or did she keep some vigil of her faith?

A sudden strange impulse, a sympathy—yes, a sympathy moved me to call across the patio and acquaint the girl with my own wakefulness. I hardly knew what I would say. My heart beat with queer excitement. I drew a trembling breath and framed her name on my lips. At that moment the candle was snuffed out.

A hazy purple spotch floated before my eyes where the light had been. Then I heard a grating door across the patio softly open and close.

An extraordinary impulse sent me flying without second thought to my own bedroom door which gave upon the court. My hand bungled a nervous interval at the latch. I swung the door open in silent violence and stepped outside. Some one half-crouched in the opposite entry. I was well across the court, my heart knocking at my ribs when I recognized the crooked form of the negress, Angela.

So strong upon me was the impression of L'wanna's passing, I came near seizing he ancient and demanding where her mistress had gone, when I realized Angela was alone. It was the old crone who had opened the grating; it was the shadow of her withered arm I had marked upon the curtain.

The revulsion set me shivering; then, somehow, the irony of the thing brought relief to my overwrought nerves. I laughed sardonically, but the wrinkled creature paid not the slightest attention to my mirth. Then I stood smiling and at last musing on the hag to whom I had poured my emotion. And yet, I reflected, in her time, in her little flash of youth, no doubt, my grimalkin had her quota of lovers, dancing attendance upon her, spending white nights outside her hut, perhaps fighting for her favor—it only they could rise now and see this huddling rack of bones....

A morning chill sent a shiver over my body, then I noticed a pale illumination filled the patio. Somewhere a cock broke into a shrill crowing. It was too late for bed again, so with a yawn and a somewhat ironic "good morning" to Angela, I set out for my traps in the breaking dawn.

When I made my way through the palm walks and reached the edge of the river, I was not surprized in the least to see Jesu's bungo lying in the reeds.

As I stood looking at the clumsy boat, I grew ashamed that I had contracted the slightest partnership with L'wanna's attempted abductor. I promised myself the next time we met I would break off all intercourse with him. As I thought on it my wrath grew, and I vowed if he overstepped the least form I would kill him outright. It was a queer twist of civilization that I must wait for some petty second offense before I could kill him for his first inflamed attack.

I was chewing on this formality when a noise ahead brought me up sharply. By way of jungle caution I stepped behind a huge caladium and stood peering between the leaves in an effort to locate the disturbance.

What I saw astounded me. Jesu Diabolo tramped amid the undergrowth, bending low to search the ground and making short casts back and forth like a hound at fault. Apparently he was trailing something.

For a full minute I stood quite at loss to account for his actions when I suddenly remembered having moved the fellow's traps. No doubt he had gone to the pau d'arco, had missed the traps and, according to his nature, had leaped at the conclusion that I had stolen them. Now he was trying to follow my yesterday's trail and recover his property.

His suspicions filled me with disgusted amusement and, at the same time, offered me an opportunity to insult the fellow and have done with him at once. I was on the eve of discovering myself when he paused, drew an old brass watch from his pocket and consulted it. He stood a moment chewing his black mustache and calculating the time painfully, then took himself off toward the river.

I was so surprized at this dénouement I did not hail him at all. Never before had I seen an Indian carry a watch or pay the slightest attention to the flight of time. I could not fancy why he should give up looking for his traps on a certain hour. If there were a mortal unhurried by the fewness of minutes to the hour, that mortal surely was Jesu Diabolo.

PRESENTLY I gave up the slight conundrum and made my way to the Brazil tree. All along the course I saw signs of Jesu's reckless search, trampled undergrowth, crushed clumps, even to the tree where I had placed his traps.

When I observed this, I stood smiling at how close he had come to his quest and yet had missed it, when my ear caught a fluttering high up in the boughs. My limed twigs had snared something.

I craned my neck and moved about under the branches trying to locate my captive. Above me the Brazil tree stretched skyward chamber on chamber. The nearer leaves looked dark and polished, but far above they shaded into bluish-green masses. At last I glimpsed the tremulous wings of my catch. They were white wings. I peered more closely, almost incredulously. It was a bell-bird—no—yes. My heart began to thump. It really was a bell-bird!

I counted the limbs upward to my bird, for a man can get lost in one of those huge trees as easily as in a skyscraper, then I set about my climb. By good fortune a Spanish arbor made a long reach from the ground to the first branches and beyond that my way was easy.

Spanish arbor is a species of morning glory and at this hour its pied goblets formed a flowery mass just above the first branches. I gripped the vine, tested it with my weight, which set all the glories in a stir. Then I started up, hand over hand.

Beneath the first branch I paused a moment for breath, when I observed a continued stirring in the flowers above me. It was near my trap. I paused, thinking perhaps a bush-master or a sloth was in Jesu's trunk-trap and I had no stomach for a nipped finger. I climbed on cautiously when out of the blossoms arose a head, a girl's head—it was L'wanna.

I came within a squeak of loosing all holds and falling twenty feet to the ground.

The girl stared at me with horror-widened eyes; then slowly she seemed to recognize me. She gave a wavering cry.

"Oh señor, is it you? Is it you?" and she fell to sobbing convulsively with her arms thrust up awkwardly among the flowers.

For full ten seconds I hung dazed, staring at her, listening to her sobs, the vine making slow half-revolutions under my weight.

"Señora!" I finally gasped.

"S-señor, won't you p-please let me out?" she swallowed her tears.

"Let you out?" I echoed blankly.

"Señor, if you only will, I never, never, never will turn your birds loose again!"

"What are you in?" I cried in amazement.

"Oh, you know!" she cried with a despairing face and tried to pull her arms from the tree.

With a shock I remembered my traps.

"You don't mean you're caught!" I cried, scrambling up on the limb.

"Si, señor," she quavered, pulling with an agonized movement.

And she was, indeed, caught in the trap. Her arms were chafed, and contusions ringed her wrists where the teeth bit. Oh, it was pitiful—pitiful even for a man, but for a woman—such a woman!

What amazed, what terrified me was Jesu Diabolo's infernal cunning. The moment he had seen the dead peacock heron with the little cross and flowers over its grave, he knew L'wanna had buried it. From this he guessed the girl must make the round of my snares before I did, liberating my captives, so he had planned instantly to set his tree-trap and catch her. That was the secret of his beating about in the jungle like a madman. He was searching for L'wanna. That was why he had timed my arrival with his disreputable watch, allowing himself time to escape before my regular appearance in order to avoid me.

When I thought if, on the preceding day, I had not heard the arapunga belling and had not moved his traps to another tree ... if he had found her....

I moved down the limb to her, slid my hands down her arms among the flowers and wrenched open the steel jaws; then I picked her up as if she had been a child.

In my arms the girl seemed to have no weight at all; indeed, she seemed scarcely flesh and blood but all lightness, flowers, and perfume and something infinitely dear.

Her hair came unbound and fell over my shoulder and breast in a jetty, rose-scented torrent. She was dizzying. When I realized what I was doing, I found myself caressing, comforting, kissing her lips, begging her not to think I had set traps for her.

And with it all, something in the back of my head, a fragment of sanity, I think, seemed to stand off in profound surprize, for it had discovered that Jesu Diabolo was right in his argument after all. It was no child clinging passionately and breathlessly to me, pressing her lips to mine, pressing her bursting heart to mine.

It seemed to me all the loneliness and craving of my whole life was concentrated and satisfied in an instant. I believe if heaven should have opened—but there is no use talking over such things between men. She said she had loved me ever since I walked to her barred door against the muzzle of her father's gun. It was foolish, drunken ecstatic talk.

We were almost frightened at the web of coincidences that had woven our lives together. What if a single strand had broken? If I had not been sent from New York to Taos: if her father had not been exiled from Caracas; if I had not met Jesu Diabolo and the alcade: if her father had aimed an inch truer; even if she had not been caught in the trap. It is amazing to think on what frail chances men and women meet and mate and people the world.

THE broad branches of the Brazil tree tempted L'wanna and me to stay aloft long after her arms had recovered from the bite of the trap. The vines made a natural hammock where we could loll and watch the butterflies and birds float in and out among the foliage. Somewhere above us a woodpecker gave a long joyful roll. A wild sow, followed by four little striped pigs, came grunting under our retreat.

It was strange that the jungle, which only the day before had seemed a sort of hideous gorgeous mill grinding out vital machines, now appeared suffused with a delirious joy of living. I think the very plants had their loves. The vines embraced the trees; the winds caressed the grass; the orchid trembled for the bee. With L'wanna in my arms, I sensed why blossoms burst in perfume and fruited.

I found the girl oddly intimate with the jungle about her. Near the ground she pointed out a sort of bone that would keep ferrets from stealing chickens. A little later an agouti hopped out of the vines at the base of our Brazil tree, and she assured me our sky-scraper must be hollow, for these little animals only lived in hollow trees. By way of experiment I pushed a stick into the vines where we sat and really found a cavity up there.

The agouti stared up at us with black inquisitive eyes and, perhaps, decided we were harmless, for it paid no further attention but nipped grass and girdled a little sapling quite unconcerned about its audience. Presently it left off its play or labor, stared bright-eyed into a thick bank of ferns. After a moment it stamped its hind foot on the ground, popped into the Spanish vines and disappeared.

"Something alarmed it," smiled L'wanna.

I glanced into the ferns, looking perhaps for a lynx or a python and indeed caught the glint of an eye.

I pointed it out and we both looked in warm carelessness, trying to decipher the rest of the animal against the gloom, when close beside the eye, I made out a dirty bluish flap.

There are no words for the fury that swept over me. I shouted Jesu Diabolo's name, flung myself on the vine and to the earth. When I touched ground, I saw him crashing through the bushes and tangle. I charged after him. As I rushed, I roared:

"You hell-hound! You dog of a devil! Set a trap for a girl."

Thorns stabbed me and broke off in my flesh; I burst through lianas. The half-breed was a brown shadow. It seemed he must get away when his foot turned on an oozy lily-pad. I was nearly eight feet behind. He was struggling to get up when I jumped headlong through a screen of air vines. One hand caught his shirt. He tore loose. My other grabbed a flying ankle. He fell full length, kicking furiously.

Somehow I pushed my head and shoulders up into his threshing legs. When I got my head past his buttock, he twisted up and looked at me. I thought the man's eye would pop out. He wriggled, beat, squirmed to keep my hand from his neck. I crawled up over him as powerfully as if I had eaten strychnine. When my fingers closed about his glottis he screamed and ended in a queer squawk. He flung out his arms, seized two handfuls of weeds and struck me in the face.

Instantly a fiery blindness blanketed me. Nettles blistered my face and flamed in my eyes. Swords darted through my head. For a moment I was stunned out of action. In that moment he slipped out of my arms. Next instant I was up, my head in flames, blindly chasing his sounds. I stormed through thorns, briars, rebounded from boles. Always I could hear his feet just in front of me. Then I plunged into water up to my waist, fell down, got up dripping and perforce came to a stand. Then I heard Jesu's voice some little distance further out, pant:

"Señor, how absurd. I set a trap for the señorita? I did not even know where it was. You put it up the Brazil tree yourself."

Jesu Diabolo sat his bungo some thirty feet from the bank quite out of danger. His boat drifted gradually in the slow current.

"You knew she buried that heron. You knew if you——"

The utter futility of upbraiding such a creature stopped me. I looked at him through clearing eyes.

"I am going to kill you, Jesu Diabolo," I said soberly.

"Why, señor?" he asked almost politely.

"For setting that trap! For spying on me and Miss Monan!" I shouted.

"Señor, does not a man visit his traps twice a day?" inquired Diabolo with a certain righteousness of defense.

At that moment I observed something that looked like the knotty end of a log drifting down the current in toward where I stood.

I quietly backed out of the water to safety among the reeds on the edge of the river. The nose of the cayman sank silently and disappeared.

No change of expression came over Jesu's face, but his eyes watched the ripple where the crocodile's snout had disappeared as if in meditation. With some little effort, I tried to show no concern and pulled my mind back to the last thing Jesu had said.

"A man may visit his traps twice a day, naturally," I agreed grimly, "but not twice in one morning."

For some reason my simple assertion flung Jesu into a surprizing transport.

"One morning!" he yelled. "One morning! Dios mios, the señor has lived in paradise today—one morning—it is sundown this moment!"

I stared up and down the yellowing river. It really was sundown.

That is how I forgot the arapunga I had limed.

IV

FOR three long minutes after my formal request, Señor Monan sat consuming his cigaret in silence. At last he made a little movement and flicked the ash.

"I suppose you have already asked L'wanna—the American custom, I believe."

I agreed, wondering how that would affect his Spanish code.

He became reflective and I anticipated L'wanna's youth as an objection, but he did not mention it.

"If you were a Venezuelan, Señor LeFever," he began again, "I would impress it upon you that my social standing is gone. If you were a Spaniard, I would say that my fortune is confiscated, but as you are an American——"

I got to my feet. This could mean only assent. I began to burble a confusion of thanks and relief when Señor Monan stopped me.

"As you are an American, I must tell you that I have killed a man. I am a murderer, Señor LeFever."

I paused blankly. He looked at me searchingly.

"Ah, that does make a difference, I see."

"Not in the least in my desire to marry your daughter," I said, "but still—a mur——"

I looked at my host. I could scarcely believe it, but still those burned-out eyes must have seen many things.

Señor Monan dropped his stub in the ash-holder.

"I knew you would say that if you were perfectly frank. The Anglo-Saxon world has a quaint indirection in moral affairs and an admirable direction in money matters—the exact opposite of our Latin races. For instance, if I had made my money by speculating in stocks and had driven half a dozen men to suicide, you would feel no such qualms as when I tell you I cut a man down in the performance of my duty—my duty, mind you."

"It does make a difference," I admitted.

Monan nodded.

"Because moral indirection conforms to the genius of your race. Take your Anglo-Saxon marriage customs. Young men and young women go about freely together during courtship."

I agreed, wondering how this could bear on the topic.

"That is because of an assumption the lover seeks in his sweetheart something other than sex."

"Certainly we assume that."

"You personally?"

"I personally, Señor Monan!"

"What?"

"A man can admire a womanly soul," I stated warmly.

My host pulled down his lips slightly.

"Your adjective suggests sex to me."

"Well, a woman's soul," I corrected tartly.

"Neuter gender?"

"Yes—if there be such a thing."

"Did you ever find yourself reveling in any man's society on account of his soul?" he inquired.

It would have been easy enough for me to have said "yes." and for a moment I thought "yes" the true answer, but when I tried to lay my finger on some specific instance in my own life, I could not do it. I shifted my ground and declared that many times I had admired a woman for her intellect.

Señor Monan paid no attention to this whatever, but finished his own argument by saying that the Spaniard accepts sex directly as the nexus between men and women, and such being the case, the two sexes are kept apart until marriage.

This discussion, at such a time, nettled me. It seemed a sort of profanation of L'wanna.

"That may be logical," I agreed shortly, "but I don't care for argument when I know and feel something is true."

Señor Monan made a placating gesture; there was even a look of satisfaction on his worn face.

"Pardon me, Señor LeFever, for trying you on these points. What you feel and believe on it will be of vital interest to your wife, and L'wanna is all I have on earth." He paused sadly, then said, "I hope you will be very tender with her, Señor LeFever."

I jumped up and grabbed his hand.

"Then what you have just said doesn't represent your heart!" I cried in great relief.

"Only my brain, and that doesn't influence a man's belief." He paused, then added: "A tiger caught one of my goats last night. Angela was greatly excited over it."

I was surprized at this break in the conversation, when it occurred to me that there might be a symbolic connection between the tiger catching the goat and some man marrying his daughter.

After this our talk shifted to my approaching wedding. This would require more servants in the house, and both Señor Monan and I thought it best that I should go to the village and employ them in order that my host might not expose himself to unnecessary publicity. Then another topic pressed forward in our conversation—L'wanna's dislike for my profession.

For some time we sat talking over this problem when Señor Monan suggested that instead of collecting specimens I might write a descriptive ornithology. The idea attracted me. Ever since boyhood I have felt the lure of authorship; in fact I had begun two or three abortive romances, but it never occurred to me to write on the familiar topic of my own occupation. When I told L'wanna of my plan, her reception of it removed the last quibble from my mind.

On the Sunday after our conversation our bans of marriage were published by a padre from Ciudad Bolivar, who made monthly visitations to Taos. The following weeks were the happiest of my life. Thanks to our isolation, Señor Monan disregarded strict Spanish convention, and nearly every day L'wanna and I set out into the jungle armed with camera, note-book and binoculars to advance our great work.

ONE morning, just as we had started on an expedition, a native woman met us among the moriche palms and to my surprize handed me a note written on a cigaret shuck.

I took it curiously, and a second look at the girl showed me the Arawak wife of the Chinese chilli-maker. I wondered what business the celestial could have with me, then at the bottom of the note, I saw the signature—

JESU ERCOLE BAVENO

.

"Is this from Jesu Diabolo?" I inquired.

The woman was scrutinizing L'wanna's face with such intensity I was forced to repeat my question, and she nodded.

I looked at the shuck again and found the text almost illegible, although the name was signed with great flourishes.

"What does he want?" I asked bruskly.

"He wants not to be killed, señor."

"How came he to send you?" I proceeded with some curiosity.

"I happened to be there, señor."

She shifted her polished black eyes toward L'wanna again.

At that moment an oven-bird broke covert like a young zeppelin not a hundred yards from us and went booming toward the river.

"Come on, L'wanna!" I cried in excitement. "A new species—mark him down!"

The Arawak girl hung trotting on our rear. "Will you kill him, señor? Will you kill him?"

"No," I cried impatiently, "tell him as long as he stays in Taos I won't touch his knavish hide."

"But, señor," argued the girl still trotting, "he wishes to trap here along the river. He knows the runs here, but you stay in the jungle all the time and perhaps you shoot him?"

"We can do without him over here," I tossed back as I hurried on.

"But, señor," whimpered the girl, "Jesu says he will be a bad half-breed no more. Maybe he will catch the tiger that kills your goats?"

I wondered how the news of the tiger's attack had seeped into the village. Perhaps through old Angela. This gave me a feeling of discomfort, and I was about to turn on the girl and order her out of the palm walks when L'wanna took the girl's part. She said we were happy and we should not give unhappiness to others.

At that moment I glimpsed the spatulate bill of my oven-bird stiffly upright among some creepers. I knew three words more would send it booming off again. As I manipulated my camera, I whispered bruskly to the girl that Jesu could trap all over the place if she would only hold her tongue and creep off without noise. This last she did very adroitly, for I never knew when she left us.

With L'wanna at my elbow, the ornithology grew like a weed in the Springtime. Señor Monan suggested that I write the book in English, that L'wanna turn it into Spanish, while he attempted a French and a Portuguese translation. Thus we hoped to publish the book simultaneously in Venezuela, Brazil and the United States, and in three European capitals.

To accomplish this, Señor Monan put me in touch with several foreign publishers, and so considerable mail accumulated for me in Taos.

I made a number of trips to the village and the alcalde, who was also postmaster, became tremendously interested in my venture, and through this we became good friends.

I always found him at his baize table, with his official blanks, his liquor, oranges and glasses. When I entered, he would blow out a delicate smoke ring through the part in his mustache, put his feet down from the table top, push glass and carafe toward me and exclaim in a long marveling breath:

"Drink, Señor LeFever! How little did I fancy I should ever drink with a writer of books in Taos! How lonely I was until you came. You may confide in me, señor; we are brothers. I, too, am a writer of books—poems. As yet they have never been published, but Doña Isabella Vitellia. who lives on the esplanade in Caracas, has done me the honor to compare my poems favorably with those of Mombello."

Then he would tell me with shining eyes of his relations with Doña Isabella Vitellia. I never found out what he meant for me to confide in him, and after a time or two I looked upon it as rhetorical.

He always had my mail at hand in a neat package on his desk, and there was a certain uniform frayedness about the seal flaps which I fancied must be caused by the long journey from civilization to Taos. However I learned the real reason in a very naïve fashion one afternoon when I entered the post and found the alcalde fairly palpitant with excitement.

"Señor!" he cried out on sight of me. "Make haste quickly, you have a great deal of mail."

I hurried, but to my surprize only a few letters lay on the desk.

I picked up the package, puzzled, when the alcalde made an impatient gesture—

"Why don't you read them?".

"I wouldn't be impolite," I told him.

"Take no notice of your friend. Here, read this one!"

He chose a flimsy envelope of French design from Paris.

I broke it open under the alcalde. It was an outright acceptance of my manuscript by Lestrade & Company.

"Isn't that glorious?" cried the alcalde, seizing my hand. "Señor, you can not fancy how uneasy I was—getting some one to print a manuscript is so difficult. I know my own poetry, señor, the poems Dona Isabella Vitellia praised so——"

My face doubtless betrayed me for he broke off, staring at me; then he clapped my hand again in the utmost good spirit.

"Think nothing of it," he declared, "I grew so impatient for my good friend LeFever—I, too, am an author—I know the pangs. You may confide in me! But what do I mean chattering like this—" seized his bottle—"this deserves a glorious round. Here's to the fame and fortune of the ornithology of Venezuela—widely, widely may it circulate!"

It was impossible to be offended. I believe I even gave him formal permission to open any future letters of mine that came under his hands.

FOR an hour or so we sat drinking and smoking and talking like schoolboys. Only those who have disposed of a first manuscript can sympathize with our elation. After a bit the alcalde began speculating on my royalties, mentioning absurdly large amounts. In the midst of our castle-building, he put his glass down and caught my arm impulsively.

"By the way, señor, I have a capital anecdote when you write another book about the animals of Venezuela."

I begged him to believe that I was solely an ornithologist, and my field did not extend to mammals.

"But to a writer like you, Señor LeFever, what is the difference, birds or beasts? Now listen, only this afternoon, a negro named Sammu Tenko brought a dead tiger into Taos. He killed it with a stroke of his club. He is a giant, señor, this Sammu Tenko. He brought it in on his back. You should have seen that mottled beauty hanging over his huge dark shoulders—a picture!"

"What did he do with it?" I inquired.

"He gave it to Jesu Diabolo to skin for the glands. I believe the half-breed is down at the river now. You might go see."

"Skinning it for the glands?" I repeated curiously.

"Yes, to make his animal scent—his lure. The fellow is uncanny at it. He can drive an animal mad. One sniff dispels all caution, all timorousness—why, I know a dozen marvelous anecdotes." The alcalde meditated a moment. "Did I ever tell you how a capybara stole Señor Monan's watch out of his pocket one day when he fell asleep in his moriche walks? Yes, indeed, really! You see the señor had accidentally touched his watch with this animal scent and—" I began to laugh—"Señor Monan got his lure from Jesu, of course."

"Naturally."

"So the señor and Jesu were once friends," I observed.

"One could hardly say friends. The half-breed trapped on the señor's plantation because the capybaras gnawed the young palms. They disagreed about—they disagreed—" he paused a moment, then observed irrelevantly—"your future wife is a lovely girl, señor, such beauty, such breeding. If I were a rich author now—" He inhaled deeply of his cigaret and breathed forth a hazy sigh, then said brightly, "Don't forget to see the tiger."

I promised and bade the alcalde adios, and as I passed through the heated plaza I debated languidly the propriety of such a visit. I had little desire to go near Jesu Diabolo, but Taos held such a deadly monotony and a jaguar was such a novelty I decided I would go see it. At the corner of the cloister I was about to step into the path leading to the river when I saw a huge jet-black negro, naked to the waist, leaning on the Chinaman's counter eating chilli.

Above a wide undulating back, a thick neck peaked off into a trivial head. The negro sprawled about the bowl, and the muscles of his black arms swelled and slumped at each slight lift of the spoon to his gross mouth. As I looked I thoroughly regretted that I had not seen Sammu Tenko march into Taos with the tiger on his back.

Sin Fan the chilli-maker regarded the voracious belly-god as intently as I. Under his flowing shirt the Chinaman's bulk spread over his bean bags. His eyes gleamed at Saramu Tenko like slits of jet in the yellow expanse of his face.

After a while my prolonged standing demanded either conversation or trade. I cast about for a remark and observed that the chilli-maker's stock of beans was running low.

"Go was fo' long," grunted Sin Fan.

"Going to leave Taos?"

I was somewhat surprized. I knew Chinese moved about, but no one had ever heard or seen one of them in transit. Sin Fan and his kind simply appeared and disappeared.

"Yes—want chilli?"

The flatness of the answer made a purchase imperative. I leased my place at the counter by taking a bowl.

"Your wife's not in this morning?" I pursued with intent to please.

Sin Fan made a clucking in his enormous bag of a throat, but to my astonishment Tammu Tenko snapped his fingers like fire crackers and bellowed with mirth. His yawping fascinated me. What I had said to amuse him I could not guess. I watched him attentively until he subsided into a wide grin. When he finished his chilli he straightened with a yawn of comfort, patted his belly, ran a huge fist into his pocket with a—

"Quanti, señor?"

"Nada (Nothing)," grunted Sin Fan, deftly hooking in the dish and refilling and replacing it before the giant.

Sammu stared at the bowl, then at the chilli-maker with surprize and delight caricatured on his uncouth face.

"Nada?"

"Nada."

"Nada!"

Sin Fan returned no answer except a faint and, I thought, a sarcastic gesture toward the bowl with pudgy yellow finger.

With a rumbled "Gracias" and the look of a grateful dog, Tenko hunkered once more about the heaping bowl and fell to sucking it into his pendulous lips.

His voracity filled me with a faint nausea. I pushed my own chilli aside. What a prodigious animal! I attempted no more conversation with either of them. The three of us differed racially from one another until we were almost of different species. By what epochs of culture I surpassed the negro! As for Sin Fan.

I studied that inscrutable off-shoot of the world's oldest civilization. Was he far down the road my own race would one day tread? Would my great, great grandsons sit as this fat chilli-maker, indifferentists, ultimate pacifists, husks of dead souls waiting for extinction?

WITH a shudder I turned from the grotesque extremes and walked across the fish-scented plaza toward the river. The river front at Taos is a bare bank piled with hides, rubber, caripe, copra and the like. A number of stakes extend out into the water where the fishermen hitch their boats during high and low flood. The harbor is choked with reeds and lily-pads which grow faster than the indolent boatmen can, or do, cut them out. Here and there these water-plants moved sinuously as a crocodile or a manatee glided among them.

For several minutes I squinted my eyes against the sun-baked scene, hunting Jesu's camp. At last some hundred yards up the river I saw a thread of smoke climbing the sky.

When I started for it, I meant only to walk within eye-shot of the half-breed's concocting, see the tiger and return. However, when I entered the jungle I found it difficult to judge the distance of the smoke through the bamboo tops.

I blundered on until at last I pushed aside a screen of leaves and stepped unexpectedly into a little circular opening. There Jesu and the Arawak wife of the chilli-maker lay dozing on a bamboo mat with their arms about each other. At my entrance neither moved, but both lifted their eyes to me from a fathomless content.

With much embarrassment and many "pardons" I attempted to back out again, but the half-breed called:

"Stay, señor, you have come to see the tiger. Sit down and look. The animal lure is boiling in the pot. You do not disturb me or Pechita, eh, does he carissima?"

He pressed the girl's lithe symmetry with lazy amorous questioning.

I saw the two were amid their irregular luna de miel, their honeymoon, and somehow, I could not repress a certain admiration for a man so unashamed of his loves.

The woman looked at me through half-open eyes, yawned luxuriously and murmured something in Arawak.

Jesu Diabolo laughed, pulled her ear, then turned to me with the duty of host written large upon him. He pointed with his free arm.

"There is where Sammu Tenko hit the tiger, just at the joint back of the head. He broke its neck, señor, but did not even scratch its skin. What a giant he is!"

I looked at the yellow and black glory stretched on bamboos at the end of the oval clearing.

"It's a wonderful pelt," I admired.

"Pechita tells me that I may trap for the tiger that disturbs Señor Monan's goats. Very well. I prepare this lure: he is mine. Then I shall have another pelt as grand as that probablemente."

I hesitated. There was no oven-bird now to hasten my answer. I looked at the lickerish fellow. He had become a benedict in a way, and only the night before the jaguar had renewed his depredations. As for getting it with a rifle, one might as well chase a flicker of sunshine and shadow.

Jesu regarded me intently with his pale protruding eye; he pressed the Indian girl's form slightly and said:

"You can hardly object to my trapping for it now, señor. When men are married, they should forgive each other their bachelor deeds, eh?"

A mirthless smile twisted the half-breed's lips. I knew quite well he was thinking of our chase through the jungle. My reluctance was unconcealed.

"We do need a skilful trapper over there——"

"Señor," said Jesu disengaging his arm and lifting himself slightly, "I understand now that Arawaks are not Spaniards. I, who am both, could not realize that—there is a line. Now I understand where Señorita Monan would be miserable where Pechita is happy. The señorita with her softness and her white skin out here in the jungle——"

The fellow's face went that peculiar ashen gray again. His pale eye stared at me.

"May I say I was wrong, señor, insane—mad—a dog with the rabies, and—shake your hand?"

"Jesu," said I, "I know that men are mad mixtures. Today I am a supremely happy man and I believe you are, too. When our quarrel's gone I see no reason for holding a grudge. Trap where and when you like, and I wish you luck."

Then Diabolo patted the girl's smooth coffee-colored skin.

"One momento, dulce," he whispered.

They kissed clingingly as if for a lifelong separation, and he arose and took my hand.

"And, señor," he said, "you will need servants at the hacienda for your approaching marriage. If you would speak a word for Pechita?"

I recalled my commission to hire a girl. Then as I looked at the girl the thought of this lithe pantheress serving L'wanna filled my mind like a picture. They would be worthy the palet of an Alma Tadema. Without more ado, I engaged Pechita as a maid for my fiancée.

The girl turned her polished black eyes on me and somehow they resembled the eyes in the tiger's pelt that lay stretched on the bamboo.

V

NONE of us at the hacienda, I believe, ever quite grew accustomed to Pechita. She was a capable maid; she kept our clothes pressed, our footgear polished, our study bright with flowers. She even assisted L'wanna in designing her wedding gowns.

The trouble was I had selected Pechita for her comeliness and that out in the jungle where women look their worst. Now that we had the girl inside she was symmetrical to a disconcerting degree. I say disconcerting, because no ordinary man, I take it, feels quite at ease when a Venus in sard fits house-slippers on his feet or brings morning coffee to his bedside.

I continually had to strangle impulses to offer her my chair and to retrieve any little article she dropped. It was hard to remember she was the maid. The fact is I never saw Pechita move about the place but what I heard the ghost of cymbals and castinets and thought of Salome's dance before Herod for the head of John the Baptist.

A trivial incident brought about the girl's discharge. One morning I entered the dining-room and saw Pechita taking an impression of the Monan coat of arms by rubbing charcoal over a paper pressed upon the design. She worked so intently I was at her shoulder before she observed me. Then she started, dropped the platter with a crash and the paper fluttered to the floor. Both of us stooped for it and our heads bumped together in an embarrassing fashion. I handed her the paper and asked her what she wanted with the impression.

She stammered and finally said that she loved beautiful things. I was surprized that she admired the escutcheon which was of severe design. I mentioned this.

"The simpler the design is," said the girl, still embarrassed, "the more easily I can tell what makes it beautiful."

I stared at the comely brown creature, astonished at such untaught analysis. She had stated instinctively a major canon of esthetics in its clearest form. I was about to follow this up with other questions when I heard a little gasp behind me. I turned and saw L'wanna staring at us with quite a pale face. She dismissed the maid with a gesture.

"Jean," she began in a queer tone, paused, then went on, "what were you. saying to Pechita about beauty?"

With a tinge of embarrassment, I saw she had given the whole affair a personal turn it in no way deserved, yet I found it a little difficult to say to my fiancée that I was not making love to her maid. However, I managed to explain it.

L'wanna seemed to understand at once, then, perhaps three minutes later, to my great surprise, she began talking breathlessly.

She said she had heard of Pechita's conduct in the village, first living with the Chinaman, then with Jesu Diabolo, "and now here she is talking to you about b-beauty. I—I don't see how she can h-have the b-boldness—" Here L'wanna began sobbing.

It nonplussed me. In the first place I wondered what gossip had spread such greasy village news. Then I was shocked at the quickness with which L'wanna connected Pechita's change of husbands and our conversation concerning beauty.

I reexplained the whole matter very carefully to my fiancée, and this time she really understood my interview with Pechita had been as impersonal as beauty itself. Nevertheless that evening Pechita was discharged, and on the whole I can not say that I regretted it.

During the following weeks we had several other girls at the hacienda, but not one suited. They were either lazy or incompetent or both. As our wedding day drew near and as sewing and baking piled up on these incompetents, I think L'wanna went to her father and through him sent me word to hire Pechita again. It was odd how we avoided all reference to the girl between ourselves.

At the time Señor Monan delivered the message we were alone in a goat lot where old Angela milked. Only the night before something had killed one of these animals, and my host and I had gone down to look over the scene. The señor stood leaning against the fence where we had found some big feline tracks. He seemed amused that L'wanna should recall the Arawak girl.

"The droll part to me is the objection that L'wanna presses against Pechita's morals," said I.

"Most men are ready to condone women," observed my host slyly.

"What I mean is," I explained, "the very thing that makes Pechita a good servant is the fact that she has lived with Sin Fan. Otherwise she would never have developed that silence and deftness and that sense of beauty that now makes her invaluable."

This lead us into a long discussion as to which was the more educative, virtue or vice. Under Señor Monan's artful sophistry I saw a dozen facets of the subject and reached no conclusion whatever. A few days later, Pechita once more glided like a dryad about the hacienda.

During this period I saw nothing of Jesu Diabolo. I almost wished for him because pumas or ocelots or some carnivore really were ravaging the señor's goats. It grew to be a sort of habit for me and the señor to go down and look at the tracks left by the marauders, and I believe in his heart he, too, thought of Jesu Diabolo, and desired the half-breed back again.

ONE waning afternoon as we returned to the hacienda after our futile inspection, I found L'wanna on the front steps of the adobe waiting for me. In her hand she held a letter sent to me by the alcalde. It had just come up from Taos by a native boy. In fact a very odd correspondence had sprung up between me and the agent for the rubber company.

It began by a note penciled on the margin of one of my incoming letters that showed me the postmaster had read it. Later a quatrain of the alcalde's verse slipped out of a letter from my Brazilian publisher. Then bits of village gossip sifted into my mail as it came through the post-office at Taos. After a while these lengthened into regular epistles. At first L'wanna was angry at such liberties, but after a bit she began to look forward to what the alcalde had to say. In reality, I suppose the poor fellow was very lonely down there among the mestizos, Caribs and Arawaks.

This particular letter seemed to amuse L'wanna, for she was smiling over it when she handed it to me. It began:

Honored Señor:

The village is all agog over your wedding, and well may it be for never again will Taos be honored by the hymenial celebrations of a great litterateur. Your maid Pechita reports all your magnificent preparations to Jesu, and he to me.

Sammu Tenko came to me today so full of chilli that positively he was filmed with grease. Apparently our giant has replaced Pechita with Sin Fan. Yesterday I saw Sammu pick up an enormous pot of boiling chilli in his bare hands, move it ten or fifteen feet for the Chinaman and sip it on the way. When he put it down he slapped his palms together as one does, when one has handled a too hot poker. I do not ask you to believe this, friend of my soul. It is quite impossible, but it is true.

There was a great wailing among the mestizos last night. Martilino, the boy who fished with a spear, was devoured by a cayman at the wharf. The boatmen succeeded in recovering an arm and a foot. Doña Maria, his mother, is begging for money to have a mass said for her son. There is much discussion whether it will cost as much to get an arm and a foot into heaven as a whole boy. I believe the padre was puzzled, but as their alcalde, I silenced them. I told them with God a day was as a thousand years, and a mere toe-nail as a whole boy and that the price would be the same. I believe I am correct.

Your admiring friend,
Juan Malar, Alcalde of Taos.

P. S. When you receive this letter come to me and let us talk over life and death. J. M.

It was near sundown when L'wanna and I finished the alcalde's gossipy letter.

"Are you going to see him?" she asked.

"I dare say I'll drop in some time."

"What does he mean by 'talk over life and death'?"

I pinched my sweetheart's chin.

"What you are to me, Doña Isabella Vitellia is to the alcalde."

I said it lightly enough, but L'wanna opened her eyes.

"Is she a doña?" There was tragedy in her tone.

For several minutes we sat discussing the unfortunate love of the alcalde for another man's wife. Against that tragic background our own love stood in warm belief.

Presently L'wanna declared it would be night before we reached the jungle, and she called Pechita to bring our tramping boots. When the maid appeared, L'wanna retired to change her footgear and to bring my flashlight and camera.

I continued on the steps filled with vague pleasant thoughts such as the evening brings when I heard a guarded voice call my name. I glanced out through the palm walks and saw the figure of a man leaning against a tree.

I was not at all averse now to seeing and speaking with Jesu Diabolo. In fact I desired to give him some instructions. However, I knew the half-breed was still afraid to show himself before Señor Monan, so I arose and walked toward the palms, thinking I would direct him to lay traps around the goat lot.

As I approached, peering through the dusk, mainly, I believe, to discover Diabolo's detestable eye-flap. I was surprized to see the expected face melt into that of the alcalde. A few steps nearer I was not only surprized, I was perplexed to see the alcalde labored under some strong emotion.

"What brought you out of your hole?" I laughed, out of Yankee habit to avoid the emotional.

"Ah, señor," he caressed his mustache, put a hand on his hip and dropped into a romantic attitude, "what a happy man you are—the beautiful L'wanna—what delicate sentiment, what poetry!"

He cast up his eyes at the fading sky and sighed deeply.

By this I knew the alcalde had heard L'wanna's sympathy that he was in such amorous despair. Ordinarily I would have changed the subject, but there was something in the evening, the drift of perfume through the air, the palms, the fading light—I made an awkward effort to sympathize in words. I even tried to fancy I had lost L'wanna in an effort to feel with him. I succeeded only too well. I became choked instead of eloquent. We English-speaking races have such maladroit emotions.

After a bit the alcalde asked me if I had received his note.

"At that moment," I assured him, "and I meant to come and see you."

"I was afraid the boy had lost it or—" my friend drew out his cigaret-case and offered me one—"or had been robbed," he finished.

"Who should rob my mail-boy in Taos?" I questioned.

The alcade shrugged and spread his hands apart, one of which held a little cigar-lighter.

"There you are. I don't know. It is a mystery. Ah, señor, before you came to Taos, how monotonous life was, nothing but vain regrets, vain longings——"

If the alcalde thought I would hark back to his lament about Doña Isabella Vitellia he was mistaken.

"But what about the mystery?" I interposed.

"I know it is a mystery, that is all," repeated the postmaster. "Eight days ago a letter was posted in my office, at night, so I could not see the writer. Well, naturally, any one would have a curiosity about a man who chooses to come creeping around at night with his letters. Why at night? Why should he not bring it in the light of open day if his heart is clean? Ah, Señor LeFever, no matter how evil you think of men, you err on the side of charity."

"Did the letter concern me in any way?"

IT WAS directed to the chief of police in Caracas?"

There was a certain inflexion in the alcalde's voice as if he questioned me delicately concerning my relations with that official.

"Don't be alarmed for me, Señor Malar," I smiled. "I have no quarrel whatever with the jefe de policia in Caracas. I am just what I seem, a bird-catcher, and nothing more."

"Oh, I did not mean that at all," protested the alcalde, "but Señor LeFever, the envelope was thin, very thin, indeed, and I distinctly saw the impression of a coat of arms on a bit of paper, and with it a letter, in barbarous handwriting saying:

In Taos, in the department of Rio Tigre, there hides a man who calls himself Monan, who is wanted for some crime. Here is his coat of arms. I know any one who bears a coat of arms must come from Caracas. There will be a wedding in the house of this Monan on the twentieth of this month. It will be easy for officers to enter among the guests and arrest this Señor Monan. The writer will guide the officers.

The postmaster paused, then added blandly:

"I saw that through the envelope. It had no name—perhaps the name was folded out of sight."

"Then Señor Monan's retirement is betrayed!" I ejaculated blankly.

"I don't know," said the alcalde. "Perhaps the jefe de policia never received that letter." He inhaled a deep breath of smoke and blew it out thoughtfully. "Our mails are so uncertain."

I seized the alcalde's hand in a glow of relief.

"Señor, I appreciate your friendship more than I can say."

"It is nothing," he protested quickly; "we intellectuals must stand together. When I looked at that letter I thought, shall I allow a brother author's bridal bed to be disturbed by the thought of a convict for a father-in-law? Shall the hoi polloi triumph over genius?"

"Then there is no danger—no immediate danger?" I said in relief.

"None, unless the writer has posted some other communication. I thought I would mention it to you. The twentieth comes on Thursday."

"Well, the cat's out of the bag anyway," I worried. "We'll have to leave here; perhaps we'll go—but there's no use my planning——"

"You might stay here and finish your book, Señor LeFever," suggested the alcalde, "and follow the señor later."

"Oh, I couldn't do that. I couldn't leave L'wanna in uncertainty. Suppose they should capture her father? Leave that child among enemies without a protector?" the thought filled me with dismay.

"Mios Dios no!" ejaculated the alcalde, seizing my hand and gripping it. "I was a fool to suggest it! I understand—how well I understand, amigo de alma (friend of my soul)." He paused a moment and then asked delicately, "Would you mind telling me what the señor did?"

"He killed a man," I said somberly enough.

The alcalde shrugged.

"Bah, what a fuss over nothing. There must be some political end to it."

"It was a political murder, I believe."

"I thought so. A mere man—we have too many men at best. The fewer the men, the greater the plenty." He took my lapel. "Do you know what I say? I say the murderer is the real patriot and the police are the real enemies of a country."

I suppose he meant to pay a sort of compliment to my future father-in-law.

At that moment I heard L'wanna calling from the entrance of the estancia where she had missed me on her return.

The alcade squeezed my hand.

"Adios, I did not want to disturb the señorita with my news. If you go, I shall think of you."

He touched his small urban hat and hurried away through the palms.

As L'wanna came up she glimpsed his retreating figure and asked me who it was. I told her and she was greatly surprized at the alcalde's visit. She inquired if he had come to talk of the Doña Vitellia.

At her innocent question a tenderness flooded me for the girl. I should not tell her the real reason of the alcalde's visit. She held the purity of a spider-lily sprung from the bosom of a marsh. I took her in my arms, and in my heart I vowed no matter what befell the Monan house, nothing should happen to her. She returned my embrace and kisses ardently, and as I felt her soft lips against mine I knew she was thinking of the alcalde and the Doña Vitellia.

After a little pause, I said—

"Now let us hurry on; we want to snap all the photographs possible tonight."

"Why tonight?" she asked curiously.

"Well, we don't know how long we'll be here."

She looked at me.

"You are not thinking of going away, Jean?"

"One never knows," I answered impersonally. "Your father came here from Caracas; he may decide to go back—or somewhere else. One never knows."

I tried to put it casually, but she must have caught the worried overtones in my voice.

"I wish he could go back to Caracas, Jean—my poor father."

She said no more, and we moved silently with our arms about each other toward the jungle.

By this time day had faded and given place to a pale moonlight. A breeze arose among the palms and set their leaves a clacking. For some reason, whether for nerves or cold, I can not say, I shivered as the shadows darkened.

The murder to which Señor Monan confessed had been till now little more than an abstraction to me; with the alcalde's warning it had crystallized into a grim enough reality. Now disquieting thoughts of pursuing officers clung to my mind. I put them away as illogical. I assured myself the earliest moment pursuers could arrive was two days distant, but the feeling remained with me. Perhaps it was not so much any actual officer that I dreaded, as—I hardly know how to express it—a sense of guilt sprung up within me. The very crime itself seemed to creep along in the moonlight behind me.

Once or twice I even glanced back through the hazy palms. They lay quite empty. I repeated to myself that we were not criminals. Till a month ago, I had never even heard of the murder. If the officers were on the trail, they would never follow me, an ornithologist, nor this innocent girl.

I shook my shoulders and attempted to throw off my apprehensions; nevertheless, for the first time since I came to Taos, I was filled with misgivings.

BY THIS time the last glimmer of day had faded and the moonlight had strengthened into brilliancy. Everywhere lay dense shadows and placid high lights. Ahead of us the jungle arose sheer as a wall. It loomed, a black mystery, filled with strange noises that did not add to my composure.

I had heard those sounds over and over, but tonight the bubbling of the hervidores. those strange birds that moan like the boiling of a kettle, brushed my nerves with a sense of fear. Even familiar sounds, as the bellowing of alligators from the distant river and the demoniacal laughter of a loon, filled me with a queer eerieness. Only the categorical knowledge that nothing in the Venezuelan wilderness, not even the jaguar or the boa, would attack man persuaded me to enter.

Inside, however, the place was not so black as it appeared. Spangles of light and shadow lay over the ground like a leopard's skin. However, the impression that something followed me persisted to such an extent that I made some pretext and paused in the warm dank gloom to watch the palms and convince myself they were indeed quite empty. We stood in our covert five, perhaps ten minutes. The long walks lay silent in the moonlight, crisscrossed with shadows. The only moving thing I saw was a bat that flickered this way and that on sudden impossible tacks. Its evolutions reminded me of some desperate fugitive pursued by invisible fees.

I still watched it when an impression grew on me that my own pursuer, whatever it was, had quitted the moriche walks and was creeping up behind me through the jungle. So strong it became, I glanced around in the spangled light. What I saw startled me. A specter monkey with enormous eyes stared at me from a low branch. The creature was harmless, but, odd to say, my apprehension increased rather than diminished.

However, the incident proved that my whole trouble was nerves. No human pursuer could shift so suddenly from grove to jungle. My jumpines was caused, no doubt, solely from Señor Monan's danger. So I went on, at least fortified if not calmed by this intellectual assurance, to the Brazil tree, where L'wanna and I did most of our photographic work.

As I have said the Brazil tree was shrouded with vines, and night blossoms filled the warm gloom with a peculiar sweetness. L'wanna was a better climber than I. She still retained the agility of early girlhood. She used the vines as ratlines and I could dimly see her slender form climbing the perfumed tangle. I was about to hand up the camera to her when her foot slipped and she would have fallen if I had not caught her.

I was surprised at the mischance. Usually she was as sure-footed as a monkey. Still, it was nothing. We swung up on the broad first limb and settled ourselves to wait for a subject worthy our lense.

Once we were quiet the jungle noises stood out plainly in the night. Far aloft in our green giant came sleepy whisperings of birds. Then a cicada that had been frightened out of his song by our climb, began a tentative whirring. A little later a mousing owl dropped by us like a shadow and struck at some prey invisible to us on the ground.

At some distance away a firefly patrolled the crest of a fern tree, rising and falling among the fronds, brilliant in shadow and pale in moonlight. Afar off the loon laughed again, and the alligators bellowed in Rio Tigre.

The glooms and sheens of the mysterious tropical night were filled with a warm green smell, as of a gigantic hothouse. Its languid air drifted sweet or spicy or rank of mold. Yet through the changing bouquet, I thought there persisted a flavor, a tang, that I had known at another time and place. In its stronger gusts I sniffed at it curiously, trying to place it; then I would forget it for other things. It was a warm, a fleshly odor, oddly insistent. Instead of memories, it seemed to stir emotions. As it drifted in and out my lungs, a feeling of langour trickled through my body as enervating as too many roses or the dawn of opium.

As we sat I sensed some kindred emotion in L'wanna. I reached out and touched her arm. She was trembling. I swung my camera aside and drew her close.

"You are not afraid," I whispered.

She lifted her arms about nay neck.

"Ah no, Amidinor!" her voice trembled. "It is the night—and the moon. See how it streams down. Oh, it pours through me!"

She stretched out her arms and shuddered in a sort of ecstacy.

I have thought, on that strange tropical night, some motiving of ancient arboreal ancestors, epochs past, revisited our brains. That murmuring moon-shot jungle crooned over us as some passionate mother over her babes. I held L'wanna close, couched among the vines, filled with a vast restfulness.

As we lay, a sloth inched up the Spanish arbor, a dull black body amid the glimmer of the flowers. We watched it with dreamy indifference as it crept topsy-turvy under the bottom of a limb between us and the moon. Presently I saw its prey, some sort of large bird perched like a black ball. I watched them intently, sloth and bird. Somehow I felt a feeling of fellowship for the sloth, as if his word were not utterly insulated from my own. He was a citizen of the tree, like me.

L'wanna stirred in my arms and lifted herself slightly.

"That is a very strange picture," she whispered; "we ought to take it for our book."

The thought of our ornithology came to my mind as unimportant as the rustle of a leaf. It was nothing whatever. I caressed my betrothed's soft body; kissed her lips, but she would stir and make the picture. She took the camera and moved to her feet. Again her foot slipped, and she would have fallen had I not caught her. The noise sent the sloth swinging silently to the tree-trunk.

L'wanna almost wept over her awkwardness.

"My slipper feels greased," she complained, and sat down and took off her slippers.

I told her to go in stocking feet and reached to take the slippers.

When I touched them my fingers really felt some sort of grease on their instep soles. It had the same pungent, peculiar odor that I had observed before.

Still, even this suggested nothing to me. In fact I thought little about it but rearranged my position along the limb with the luxury of a man coming out of sleep, when I heard my companion give a gasp.

I looked at her curiously.

L'WANNA stooped, peering down through the gloom. When she sensed my unspoken question, she pointed silently downward with her free arm. I looked with rising apprehension but saw nothing except the moon-spangled undergrowth. Again I thought of officers, and again a brush of unreasonable fear went over me. I moistened my lips and scrutinized every tree-trunk near-by for a hidden man. Then I became aware of a sudden silence fallen over the jungle.

I turned to L'wanna and barely framed the word——

"Where?"

"Wait till it moves again," she breathed.

"It?" I repeated, staring below and trying to follow her finger.

Apparently she was pointing at a blank patch of spangled moonlight when she drew a little intake of breath and said—

"There!"

And it seemed to me that a patch, an undefined portion of that moonlight moved nearer the bole of our tree. It was barely discernible, a mere outline gliding along the mottled ground. The outline had the form of a huge cat.

I felt a shock, but a moment's reflection told me that jaguars never stalked human beings. Then I sat up on the limb with a sensation of actual pleasure that I might see this jungle tragedy. I was sharply excited but not afraid. I even hoped that the denouement might be within hearing, if not within sight of our eyrie.

As I watched my mind became oddly attentive to details. I noted the nervous flicker of the tip of the carnivore's tail, the gradual silent advance; then out of the spangled shadows below appeared two coals of greenish fire.

As I looked at the lambent eyes, I suddenly recalled that a cat never looks away from the game it is stalking. It would be difficult to describe the thrill that went over me when I realized I was not the spectator, but the protagonist of the drama staged in this silent jungle. I almost stopped breathing as I stared down at the faint mottled outline and the two greenish coals.

A dozen plans flashed through my head. Should I move? I felt sure any movement would be visited by an immediate charge from the big cat below. If we remained motionless our fate was even more certain. I whispered the danger to L'wanna without shifting my eyes.

She made some reply, but her whisper faded into silence, for at the faint sound the jaguar had come sharply ahead as noiselessly as the moving of a shadow. A crawly feeling went over my body. At the same time, even in the midst of our imminent danger, I suddenly understood and realized the fantastic deviltry of Jesu Diabolo.

He had spread his lure all about the Brazil tree, which he knew was our photographic field. The very grease on L'wanna's slippers must have been animal scent, plastered there by the Arawak girl at the bidding of her lover. Then if we escaped this the whole estancia was to be raided by officers. It was like walking through a phantasmagoria. As I beat my brain for some way out of our present trap I wondered about other pitfalls. I glanced up the tree—but any tree-traps set above us to stop our upward flight would be masked.

A sweat broke out on me. My fiancée was on the outside of the limb.

"L'wanna," I whispered, "slip around me; climb up the tree carefully."

"Let's both make a start together," she planned hurriedly. "You go first."

"Give me the flashlight."

A wild scheme darted through my head.

"Oh, look—climb, climb, climb!"

The monster below made a sudden bound of horrifying height. It was not ten feet below us. I leaped for the branch above and by good luck caught it. As I jerked up on the limb I heard the rasp of huge claws in bark, then a loud report and a blinding flare in the night. L'wanna had exploded the flashlight.

I looked back. As soon as my eyes could see I made out L'wanna on the first branch staring below. The cat was gone.

"Come on!" I shouted reaching down.

"Go higher! Quick! Get out of my way! I can climb faster than you!"

Such urgency in her cry sent me scrambling up the trunk. I had penetrated a mass of foliage when suddenly L'awnna screamed my name twice, first from a bursting throat, then muffled—strangled.

"What is it? What's the matter?" My mouth was so dry I could hardly speak. "L'wanna? L'wanna!"

At the silence below a weakness came over me. My legs turned to water. I clung to the limb to keep from falling; then climbed back down, sliding from branch to branch and peered below.

The first limb was empty. The whole tree, the ground below was void, a vacant patchwork of moonlight and shadow. Not a trace of L'wanna or of the tiger was anywhere. Both might have melted into the spangled sheen.

Then I knew that to save me, L'wanna had stood on that first limb and had deliberately allowed the monster to reach her while I climbed to safety.

Standing there shaking I called her name; I screamed it out. I don't know how many times. Between screams I held my breath and listened open-mouthed. I heard a vagrant breath of night-wand rustle through the trees and die away in the clammy stillness.

After a while a physical nausea filled me. I lay down on the limb and closed my eyes. I don"t know how long I lay, perhaps ten minutes, perhaps an hour. I remember I kept twisting my head from side to side, because a vision of L'wanna shrinking before the tiger tortured my eyes. I could still hear her screaming my name. I grew deathly sick, dizzy. I almost fell. I clutched the vines with a swimming head, but a moment later I decided I would fall deliberately. A moment's stunned thought, however, told me I should climb higher, as high as possible, and crush myself.

The Brazil tree offered dizzy heights. I got myself together like a man weakened from long sickness. I lifted myself very carefully and took the branch above me. I went up several branches higher. Then, when I contrasted my own snaking efforts to reach an easy death with L'wanna's immolation, a hideous contempt for myself burned me.

I stopped climbing. I would drop from where I was. My fingers were loosening when far off through the night I heard the laughter of a loon.

For some reason its irony brought Jesu Diabolo to my mind. Thought of the half-breed seemed to rouse some question in my numb brain, some impulse toward action. I scarcely knew what. I stood clinging to the vines trying to think.

What could I do to Jesu Diabolo?

After painful study my duty clarified into a very simple thing. I felt before I could have any right to join L'wanna, I must first go to Jesu Diabolo's camp and kill him. After that I might come back to the Brazil tree and to the woman who had called my name.

I lowered myself like a palsied man. The vines where L'wanna had stood were torn and draggled.

VI

AS I stumbled through the moriche walks, following the path to the hacienda I heard prolonged shrieks ahead of me. In my mental state I was not surprized. I was not even curious at the outcry. It seemed but natural for the whole world to be shrieking for the death of L'wanna.

Presently a crooked figure appeared in the moonlight tottering toward me from the direction of the Monan adobe. The screams grew louder and louder, and then between shrieks I heard a mumbling.

"Oh Holy Mother!" Shriek. "Peccavimus." Shriek.

"Mother of God!" Shriek. "Dominus nosotros." Shriek.

Yet so bludgeoned was my brain that it seemed commonplace, usual, that old Angela should totter toward me venting streams of despair, Spanish and patristic Latin.

"Oh, Señor LeFever! Oh, my God! The soldiers have come—for my maestro! Oh, gentle Mary! Run, Señor LeFever! Shoot, kill, oh——"

I put my hand on the old wench's shoulder and turned her about. I remember repeating several times:

"It makes no difference, Angela! L'wanna is dead! Go back to the casa! L'wanna is dead! Don't shriek so. She is dead! Dead! Oh, merciful God, L'wanna is dead!"

Hysterics shook the old woman. She wrung her claws and continued her screeching as she turned back toward the adobe. But such was the hammering in my head as I hurried toward Taos, I forgot her before her outcries died in distance.

My mind was in chaos as I jogged on to kill Jesu Diabolo. The moonlight looked reddish. As I passed a hut in the jungle a dog deserted its home and ran yelping into the undergrowth. Queer disconnected flashes went through my brain. I remember thinking this hell on earth was the aftermath of Señor Monan's murder. As I ran past the mission the hoary age of the pile suddenly shrunk my own life to the beat of a bird's wing. I saw myself as I was, a hurrying, hating shadow of flesh that would fade to carrion before morning.

In one of the mission stalls burned a dim light. As I drew near a huge man bearing an enormous bundle moved out of the shadows and turned toward the river. Behind this giant came the ponderous baggy body of the chilli-maker. As the two crept slowly toward the landing, each bearing a great weight, I overhauled and passed them. Nobody spoke. I recalled for a second Sin Fan's intention to leave Taos. Now he was going.

Fifty yards further I smelled the dampness of the river. I checked my speed and went on more cautiously. To my right, as I turned down the river, lay the bamboo brake which guarded Jesu's camp. The trail through the brake was more distinct now than when I had first seen it. An inky path it lay until it lost itself in the moon-washed bamboo. By way of caution I glanced back before I entered. Only the two slow enormous figures were in sight and they were half-way toward the wharf.

As I entered I heard a sound, a pulsing sound. As I threaded the brake it grew and grew until a gust of furious music beat in my ears. It held the rhythm and timbre of a viol or 'cello in the hands of a bacchante. The music whirled and leaped through the brake with impish zest. It conjured up maenads and corybantes in some Walpurgis night.

The nearer I crept, the louder it grew, and presently I heard with it the rhythm of feet and a woman's panting breath. Another turn and I saw the half-breed and the Arawak girl whirling about each other in a mad fandango.

I crouched in the shadow of a clump and watched them. As they spun in the full moon, I caught glimpses of their faces in rapid sequence. Diabolo wore the ecstatic smile of a dancer. His eye-flap beat his cheek, and there was a flame in Pechita's face. She held her heart up to this brown Pan as a tigress might to its mate. He pursued her: she eluded. Now he caught her in his arms only for her to wheel away. At certain rhythmic intervals she flung her torso back wildly in his arms and on the upswing spun over his shoulder, then danced away.

Both were without weight; they were flickering flames of joy in the moonlight. They were delirious at the Monan destruction, and yet somehow through it all, they preserved a sort of innocence—children dancing around a tortured frog—there is no explanation for it.

The music was Jesu's own humming. No viol could have been more vibrant. Where he picked up the air or improvisation, God knows. Perhaps the ruin he had wrought inspired him.

As I crouched in the bamboo a feeling almost of peace came over me. My pain of life would soon be over, and so would Jesu's frothy dance. The two of us would no doubt rest quietly enough beside L'wanna, underground.

I waited till the whirling figures were quite near me when I stepped into the moonlight.

The dancers stopped so suddenly that my eyes swung onward with their rhythm. Pechita gave a little gasp. Jesu stared a moment. His face was in shallow. Then he began a bland "Buenos nochas, señor," when I leaped at him. The girl shrieked, he reeled back; then we went to the ground struggling in each other's arms.

The half-breed fought with the sudden fury of a cat, beating my head with his open palms, Latin fashion. I think his race does not know what a fist is for, but the hard cushions of his palms jarred fire into my eyes and rang like a bell in my ears.

My arms were under his and I kept struggling to reach up around back of his shoulders and across his throat for a reverse Nelson. With such a leverage I could have choked him instantly, perhaps have broken his neck.

THE Indian knew nothing of wrestling; his frantic beating told that. He kicked my shins, knocked and shoved my head. Sweat broke out over him. Then just as my fingers clawed up around his damp neck the Arawak girl locked her hands under my chin and began pulling and shrieking. It brought us to a deadlock. I lunged forward with all my might. Two inches more and my fingers would have met over Diabolo's gorge. The half-breed writhed and doubled like a worm; he butted me in the face. Somehow he drew up his knees and kicked with all his might into the pit of my stomach.

Nausea and spasms of pain shot through me. I flung myself sidewise, gripped him again and wrapped a leg around his. He stretched his neck forward to avoid my crawling lingers until his eye-flap fanned my face.

He screamed Pechita's name. At that moment my fingers closed about his glottis. With a terrible effort of the muscles under my grip, he wheezed out—"Knife!"

Instantly the woman loosened my throat. I gulped a great breath. I heard her rush for a weapon to stab me in the back. But in that interim I flung my whole strength against the breed's gullet.

He doubled backward, his one pale eye protruding beyond its socket in the moonlight. He made queer gagging noises. His fingers fluttered over my hands as if he were begging dumbly. I hated him because he begged. I prayed I could kill him before the girl stabbed. I prayed God she would stab straight in, not cut across my back muscles and stop the pressure that was garrotting her lover.

I heard steps behind me. I flung my last ounce of fury against his throat to kill before I went, when two big fingers pressed into my clutching hands and opened them. A vise grip took my shoulder and separated me from Jesu Diabolo as if we had been manikins. Jesu rolled over on his back with a hard rasping breath.

A terrible despair filled me that my murder was balked when I realized Jesu Diabolo would live. I sprang at the prostrate man from all-fours, but bumped head and shoulders into Sammu Tenko's big naked calves which stopped me like pads of rubber. I tried to switch around them. The legs moved and blocked me and finally with a little fillip kicked me a couple of yards away. I gave up hope in my strength and began begging desperately.

"Sammu, let me to him! For God's sake, Sammu, don't stop me!"

I charged again, imploring the black man to let me pass, but he swung his hip around and knocked me sprawling. I lay sobbing and cursing and begging. I think I screamed that Jesu had killed L'wanna—I don't know what I said.

Presently I saw one hand of the negro held Pechita by her two wrists. She still grasped a knife but it was immobile. By this, time the half-breed was on his knees and began in a shocking aspirate—

"Sammu—Sammu—dear friends, I will repay—my soul's brother—Sammu—all I have is yours—that madman—" he pointed toward me, then choked suddenly and spat a dark stain in the moonlight.

To my amazement Sammu reached his free arm under Diabolo's waist and straightened up, shouldering him. Jesu caught his breath but said nothing as he rose in air.

I stopped my babble of curses and looked at the negro with the trapper on his shoulder and the girl in his hand. The ebony animal stood a moment, then moved quite simply out of the cleared space down the path. Jesu's legs dragged along the bamboo walls.

As they moved up I got up and followed.

Once I said shakily—

"I—I want to kill him, Sammu."

But it sounded so puerile I said no more.

After a while Jesu said—

"Sammu, my heart's friend, I can walk now."

The negro moved along silently. Apparently he did not hear. To tell the truth my own anger and frustration were slipping into amazement. I followed perhaps a yard behind Pechita.

Presently Jesu said again with a queer quality coming into his voice—

"Sammu, if you will put me down we can get along faster—good Sammu."

The negro might have been stone deaf as he strode on with his two captives. What he meant to do with them I had not the slightest idea. Pechita made no sound, but presently with a wrist movement she tossed the knife into the bamboos. I felt the impulse that moved her. To carry a knife around Sammu Tenko was an absurdity. Every moment my wonder grew stronger and stronger. I was about to question the negro myself when we passed out of the brake. Diabolo, I think, felt his legs quit dragging the big canes, for he said with apprehension creeping into his tones:

"Sammu! What are you going to do with us, Sammu? Where are we going?"

At the continued silence the Indian began squirming, trying to twist off the shoulder, but a moment later he gave a sharp grunt and lay still, and I knew that Sammu's black arm had given him a warning squeeze. I saw Jesu twist his head trying to locate himself, but his face was toward the sky, and he could see, perhaps, little more than the tree-tops on each side.

We really turned up the river-bank, the four of us, and in the distance I saw the bloated form of the chilli-maker. Pechita saw him, too, for suddenly she began swinging against the black hand with all her might. Her slight resistance did not cause the giant even to lean forward or throw his step out of rhythm. She doubled over his big fist, and I saw the gleam of white teeth as she bit. Sammu gave a little push with his fingers. Her head bobbed back and she began sobbing out:

"Sammu! Sammu! What are you going to do with me? Let me go, Sammu! Sammu, please, ple-a-s-e——"

Then she tried to kick his legs and begged between kicks. She stared up the river and grew wilder. She screamed, implored in desperate babbling haste. At last she pushed close to his side and whispered up:

"Sammu! Sammu! Look at me!"

To my surprise the giant did look around. There was a kind of grin on his pendulous lips. Pechita peered up into his eyes.

"Sammu!" she whispered shakily. "Let me go, Sammu—I—I'll be your—woman—Sammu!"

I don't know why I trailed on behind the three. God knows all thought of vengeance was frozen from my heart by the growing menace of Sammu's silence. I am sure Sin Fan had warned him neither to talk nor to argue. One word and without question he would have fallen victim to Jesu's tongue or to Pechita's lures.

WHEN we reached the wharf the bellying Chinaman received the girl's wrists in his hand, then stood impassive. As far as I could see his wide face looked exactly as it did when I first saw him silting by his pots, brooding over his young wife.

A number of leathern straps lay at his feet. Sammu picked up three of these, lowered Jesu, bound the half-breed's hands and feet and placed a gag in his mouth. Then the negro hesitated the fraction of a second and looked toward his master. Sin Fan barely nodded.

I believe at the nodding of that expressionless face I would have done something to help even Jesu Diabolo had it been in my power. I drew long breaths and sat staring at the actors.

From the wharf a series of stakes led into the river where boatmen moored their craft as the water rose and fell. Beyond these stakes were a sprinkling of reeds. In the moonlight I could see the reeds move in sinuous ripples as some manatee or crocodile browsed among them.

Sammu picked up his burden and waded gingerly to a stake that was perhaps thigh-deep to an ordinary man. Here he bound Diabolo in a sitting posture. Only the half-breed's head was exposed above the surface. It was a queer sight. The gag across the head was a black mark; a high light on the bluish flap looked like a clean round hole straight through Jesu's skull. The good eye stared; once I saw it bat.

Sammu spattered the water three times with his palm, then waded ashore with a certain haste.

A sick feeling came over me. I looked away. It happened my eyes fell on Pechita. The girl's face was clayey even to the lips. Sin Fan watched Jesu calmly, his oblique eyes batting at regular intervals.

For a full minute I stared at the Chinaman and his recovered woman. Suddenly a horrible look came into Pechita's face; I thought her eyes would start from her head. I heard a splash in the river, then a bubbling.

Sin Fan watched the stakes for upward of a minute and a half with a nerveless attention, then turned and waddled toward the water, leading the girl.

I stopped breathing, not knowing what to expect.

A balandra lay moored at the wharf piled with pots and a few bags of beans. He drew the girl aboard and put her among the beans. She might have been another bag.

Sammu Tenko cast off the line, stepped aboard, picked up the pole and leaned his weight against it. The balandra moved away from the wharf into the current. They drifted out into the placid moonlight, the negro poling, Sin Fan sitting motionless among his pots and Pechita lying limp across the bean bags as if she were dead.

I sat staring until the boat grew indistinct and finally faded into the luminous water. I sat with even my own thirst for death deadened.

At last when I gained the courage I looked around at the boat-stakes. They were quite empty.

I DO not know how long I sat, nor could I chronicle my thoughts if I would. At length I heard footsteps behind me: some one laid a hand on my shoulder and I saw it was the alcalde.

He told me Señor Monan and the soldiers were inquiring for me at the mission. It seemed the soldiers were of Señor Monan's political party and had come to escort their leader into Peru. In a roundabout way the alcalde explained that he had redirected Jesu's letter to a man in Caracas—a man with whom Señor Monan had been corresponding. As a result Monan's friends had come and Jesu had directed them to the hacienda.

L'wanna was with the party. Old Angela had found the men and had told them of L'wanna's supposed death. The whole group then hurried to the Brazil tree and had found the girl where she had fallen into the hollow bole when the jaguar leaped. Like all the cat family, the big feline had given up its game when the first charge failed.

The men found L'wanna stunned from her fall. They were guided in their search by young capybaras on the inside creaking their distress.

Some two years later when L'wanna and I were writing our "Birds of Brazil," we found a Chinaman and a gigantic negro running a chilli-shop in one of the upper Amazon towns, Teffe, I believe the place was called. However, we were never sure they were the men we had known in Taos. They gave no sign of recognition when we purchased a bowl at their stand. Opium had reduced them to mere skeletons of their former selves.

No woman was with them.

Copyright, 1919 by the Ridgway Company in the United States and Great Britain. All rights reserved.