ava finishing Mr. Teck as he lay on the ground----"

She gave a start and a moan. He recoiled in contrition.

At last, when she had bade him continue:

"Besides, they was after us all the way. Sometimes they even showed up
in our path instead of behind us, waving their shields and shouting for
a parley. But we'd had enough of their treachery; and our boys let
them have it. Night and day it was dodge and run. Then we got out of
the Mambava forests, and they carried me the rest of the way in a
hammock made of vines and poles. Even then they never dared to light a
fire, because we could always hear the Mambava behind us, telephoning
from one village to another with their drums. But I couldn't hope to
make you feel it, ma'am, even what I took in myself when I wasn't out
of my head. It was just bad. Of course, the worst of it was that Mr.
Teck was gone."

He began to cry weakly, exclaiming:

"I'd been with him everywheres!"

He was living with relatives. He hoped to get a job as a watchman.
This idea was repugnant to her. The shattered, tremulous, little man
was dignified by his grief, the intensity of which, after all this
time, filled her with self-contempt. Then she thought, "But now, by
his aid, I shall regain that dear grief!" She said:

"You must let me arrange to have your pay go on. That's what Mr. Teck
would have wished."

She took his address, told a servant to call a taxicab, and went down
the front steps with Parr, holding him by his bony arm as he lowered
his crutches. Overwhelmed by this condescension, he stammered:

"I was afraid to come here, ma'am."

She replied:

"We need each other."

Next day she sought him out.

She found him near Stuyvesant Square, in a shabby room overlooking a
back yard in which an ailanthus tree spread its limbs above some
clothes lines. She leaned forward in a raveled chair, with her veil
tucked up so that she could see him better, her gloved hands clasped
tightly in her lap, her eyes intent. When he had recovered from her
simplicity, Parr prepared to tell her what she had come to hear.

But there were so many tales about the hero to choose from!

"Anything," she exclaimed. "Make me hear what he used to say, know
what he used to think. Make me see him there. Make him live!"

She meant, "Make him vivid again in my heart, where, against all my
efforts, his face has faded away."

Parr held his crutches against his shoulder as if they were the ha