f potash; but in spite of the precaution the shoulder was
swelling rapidly.

"We'll take him on to where Tudor is lying," Joan said. "The walking
will help to keep up his circulation and scatter the poison. Adamu Adam,
you take hold that boy. Maybe he will want to sleep. Shake him up. If
he sleep he die."

The advance was more rapid now, for Binu Charley placed the captive
bushman in front of him and made him clear the run-way of traps. Once,
at a sharp turn where a man's shoulder would unavoidably brush against a
screen of leaves, the bushman displayed great caution as he spread the
leaves aside and exposed the head of a sharp-pointed spear, so set that
the casual passer-by would receive at the least a nasty scratch.

"My word," said Binu Charley, "that fella spear allee same devil-devil."

He took the spear and was examining it when suddenly he made as if to
stick it into the bushman. It was a bit of simulated playfulness, but
the bushman sprang back in evident fright. Poisoned the weapon was
beyond any doubt, and thereafter Binu Charley carried it threateningly at
the prisoner's back.

The sun, sinking behind a lofty western peak, brought on an early but
lingering twilight, and the expedition plodded on through the evil
forest--the place of mystery and fear, of death swift and silent and
horrible, of brutish appetite and degraded instinct, of human life that
still wallowed in the primeval slime, of savagery degenerate and abysmal.
No slightest breezes blew in the gloomy silence, and the air was stale
and humid and suffocating. The sweat poured unceasingly from their
bodies, and in their nostrils was the heavy smell of rotting vegetation
and of black earth that was a-crawl with fecund life.

They turned aside from the run-way at a place indicated by Binu Charley,
and, sometimes crawling on hands and knees through the damp black muck,
at other times creeping and climbing through the tangled undergrowth a
dozen feet from the ground, they came to an immense banyan tree, half an
acre in extent, that made in the innermost heart of the jungle a denser
jungle of its own. From out of its black depths came the voice of a man
singing in a cracked, eerie voice.

"My word, that big fella marster he no die!"

The singing stopped, and the voice, faint and weak, called out a hello.
Joan answered, and then the voice explained.

"I'm not wandering. I was just singing to keep my spirits up. Have you
got anything t