hed the further end of the street just as the witch
doctor walked out into the open.

Walker ran forward a yard or so until he too stood plain to see on the
level ground. The witch doctor did see him and stopped. He stopped
only for a moment and gazed earnestly in Walker's direction. Then he
went on again towards his own hut in the forest.

Walker made no attempt to follow him. "He has seen me," he thought.
"If he knows me he will come down to the river bank to-night."
Consequently, he made the black rowers camp a couple of hundred yards
down stream. He himself remained alone in his canoe.

The night fell moonless and black, and the enclosing forest made it
yet blacker. A few stars burned in the strip of sky above his head
like gold spangles on a strip of black velvet. Those stars and the
glimmering of the clay bank to which the boat was moored were the
only lights which Walker had. It was as dark as the night when Walker
waited for Hatteras at the wicket-gate.

He placed his gun and a pouch of cartridges on one side, an unlighted
lantern on the other, and then he took up his banjo and again he
waited. He waited for a couple of hours, until a light crackle as of
twigs snapping came to him out of the forest. Walker struck a chord on
his banjo and played a hymn tune. He played "Abide with me," thinking
that some picture of a home, of a Sunday evening in England's summer
time, perhaps of a group of girls singing about a piano might flash
into the darkened mind of the man upon the bank and draw him as with
cords. The music went tinkling up and down the river, but no one
spoke, no one moved upon the bank. So Walker changed the tune and
played a melody of the barrel organs and Piccadilly circus. He had not
played more than a dozen bars before he heard a sob from the bank and
then the sound of some one sliding down the clay. The next instant a
figure shone black against the clay. The boat lurched under the weight
of a foot upon the gunwale, and a man plumped down in front of Walker.

"Well, what is it?" asked Walker, as he laid down his banjo and felt
for a match in his pocket.

It seemed as though the words roused the man to a perception that he
had made a mistake. He said as much hurriedly in trade-English, and
sprang up as though he would leap from the boat. Walker caught hold of
his ankle.

"No, you don't," said he, "you must have meant to visit me. This isn't
Heally," and he jerked the man back into the bottom of