nt of the foregoing
events. The whole atmosphere of the tangled forest, of the deep-flowing
river, seems to breathe death. The dank, decaying vegetation, the
dimness, the very airlessness of the sweltering valley--all this is not
merely heat. It is asphyxia. It is strangely silent too; only the
murmur of the river, and that remindful of its voracious denizens,
breaks upon the fever-breathing stillness. He shivers, then, as with an
effort, starts up, and going over to his horse, he hitches it, straps
tighter the girths, and mounted, rides away down the dim, overhung path.

But not until six hours later does he remember that the dead man's
shotgun has been left lying just where it was dropped.

CHAPTER TWO.

THE MYSTERY.

For some time the thought uppermost in the mind of the survivor was that
of relief. An incubus had fallen from him; a plague spot that for the
last two or three years had been eating into and embittering his life,
and rendering its otherwise achieved success null and void.

He did not regret what he had done. He had given the other every
chance, and the other had refused to take it. If ever an act of
self-defence had been committed it was this one. Self-defence, yes; for
sooner or later the dead man's exactions would have culminated in his
own ruin and suicide. Even from the physical side of it the other had
drawn a weapon upon him. And, in sum, what more loathsome and poisonous
animal exists in the world than a blackmailer? This one had richly
earned his fate.

That was all very well, but in came another side to the situation. How
would the law regard it? Well, he supposed that in this wild,
out-of-the-way part things were done of which the law never got wind at
all. The country, of course, was within the administration of British
jurisprudence, but then, as he had told the slain man, they had not been
seen together, and he had done his best to destroy all possibility of
the discovery of any _corpus delicti_.

But as he held on through the dark and solemn forest path he grew less
elate. The hideous end of the dead man seemed to haunt him, the agony
depicted on that livid distorted countenance, the whole seemed to rise
up before him again in these gloomy shades. He concentrated his
attention on the surroundings, vividly interesting in their wildness and
novelty, in their strange denizens, specimens of which in the shape of
bird or animal would now and again dash across his wa