filler
was trying to twist the spill. And he could not. It became evident to
them that he could not. The fingers moved painfully, trembling....
Curious fingers he had, stumpy and thick and clumsy as if covered with
ragged gloves, wholly unequal to the delicate task.

* * * * *

Slowly Nivin levered his lank frame out of the chair and moved a pace
like a somnambulist and stood staring at those fingers. He straightened
and transfixed De Haan. "Where's your police?" he whispered.
"Guns--soldiers--something--!"

"What? What is it?"

Nivin stood braced like a man at the edge of a precipice.

"To hold this place."

De Haan looked around over the patch of lighted garden into the banks of
shrubbery and further dim tree shapes.

"I hold zis place," he said simply, bulking big and broad. "I am here.
None of my people will harm us now, whatever zey may haf done, whatever
you may mean. And zen--?"

Without a word Nivin stepped into the circle about the palm, stepped up
to the crouching, sinister captive, flung an arm about him and seemed to
wrestle. A knife wrought swiftly in his hand with little flashes.

"_N-n-not--not--not monkeys!_" burst a broken voice, sobbing with
eagerness to top the phrase.

And in the fantastic glow of paper lanterns stood Alfred Poynter
Tunstal, surely the strangest figure to which a dapper and sophisticated
seeker after truth was ever reduced, with a face blackened and
unrecognizable like a hideous caricature and slashed across by the raw
wound of his recent gag, clad, head to heel, in the plastered red hide
of a monstrous orang-utan, the true jungle man!

So he stood to give testimony and make atonement for various things.

"Not monkeys!" he gasped hysterically. "_I_ thought so--_I_ thought they
were--and they made a monkey out of me!"

He swayed and straightened in Nivin's grip.

"I killed their ape. I put the touch of dishonor on a brown skin. And
they served me proper for it--proper. But I've got the proof you
want....

"All day I've been sitting there, under that tree. The man--the man who
bought those cinnabar girls--he came to talk business.

"It's true. He gets those girls in starving villages. They engage for
service; that's all. They don't know--don't understand--till too
late.... Three of them now in that house back there waiting shipment!
Blind victims--an incidental side line to Lol Raman!"

"Who?" thundered De Haan!

A long, hairy arm