y in
horror.

"It's a sin to let ANY man die," replied Oscard, and with his great
strength he shook Durnovo like a garment.

And so Victor Durnovo died. His stained soul left his body in Guy
Oscard's hands, and the big Englishman shook the corpse, trying to awake
it from that sleep which knows no earthly waking.

So, after all, Heaven stepped in and laid its softening hand on the
judgment of men. But there was a strange irony in the mode of death. It
was strange that this man, who never could have closed his eyes again,
should have been stricken down by the sleeping sickness.

They laid the body on the floor, and covered the face, which was less
gruesome in death, for the pity of the eyes had given place to peace.

The morning light, bursting suddenly through the trees as it does in
Equatorial Africa, showed the room set in order and Guy Oscard sleeping
in his camp-chair. Behind him, on the floor, lay the form of Victor
Durnovo. Joseph, less iron-nerved than the great big-game hunter, was
awake and astir with the dawn. He, too, was calmer now. He had seen
death face to face too often to be appalled by it in broad daylight.

So they buried Victor Durnovo between the two giant palms at Msala, with
his feet turned towards the river which he had made his, as if ready to
arise when the call comes and undertake one of those marvellous journeys
of his which are yet a household word on the West Coast.

The cloth fluttered as they lowered him into his narrow resting-place,
and the face they covered had a strange mystic grin, as if he saw
something that they could not perceive. Perhaps he did. Perhaps he saw
the Simiacine Plateau, and knew that, after all, he had won the last
throw; for up there, far above the table-lands of Central Africa, there
lay beneath high Heaven a charnel-house. Hounded down the slope by his
tormentors, he had left a memento behind him surer than their torturing
knives, keener than their sharpest steel--he had left the sleeping
sickness behind him.

His last journey had been worthy of his reputation. In twenty days he
had covered the distance between the Plateau and Msala, stumbling on
alone, blinded, wounded, sore-stricken, through a thousand daily valleys
of death. With wonderful endurance he had paddled night and day down
the sleek river without rest, with the dread microbe of the sleeping
sickness slowly creeping through his veins.

He had lived in dread of this disease, as men do of a sickn