imes and, like Jorgenson, is
offensive and difficult to answer.
"Remember that I am not a shadow but a living woman still, Captain
Jorgenson. I can live and I can die. Send me over to share their fate."
"Sure you would like?" asked the roused Jorgenson in a voice that had an
unexpected living quality, a faint vibration which no man had known in
it for years. "There may be death in it," he mumbled, relapsing into
indifference.
"Who cares?" she said, recklessly. "All I want is to ask Tom a question
and hear his answer. That's what I would like. That's what I must have."
II
Along the hot and gloomy forest path, neglected, overgrown and strangled
in the fierce life of the jungle, there came a faint rustle of leaves.
Jaffir, the servant of princes, the messenger of great men, walked,
stooping, with a broad chopper in his hand. He was naked from the waist
upward, his shoulders and arms were scratched and bleeding. A multitude
of biting insects made a cloud about his head. He had lost his costly
and ancient head-kerchief, and when in a slightly wider space he stopped
in a listening attitude anybody would have taken him for a fugitive.
He waved his arms about, slapping his shoulders, the sides of his head,
his heaving flanks; then, motionless, listened again for a while. A
sound of firing, not so much made faint by distance as muffled by the
masses of foliage, reached his ears, dropping shots which he could have
counted if he had cared to. "There is fighting in the forest already,"
he thought. Then putting his head low in the tunnel of vegetation he
dashed forward out of the horrible cloud of flies, which he actually
managed for an instant to leave behind him. But it was not from the
cruelty of insects that he was flying, for no man could hope to drop
that escort, and Jaffir in his life of a faithful messenger had been
accustomed, if such an extravagant phrase may be used, to be eaten
alive. Bent nearly double he glided and dodged between the trees,
through the undergrowth, his brown body streaming with sweat, his firm
limbs gleaming like limbs of imperishable bronze through the mass
of green leaves that are forever born and forever dying. For all his
desperate haste he was no longer a fugitive; he was simply a man in a
tremendous hurry. His flight, which had begun with a bound and a rush
and a general display of great presence of mind, was a simple issue
from a critical situation. Issues from critical situation
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