hough good climbers and
sliders.

"You don't need person go with you," said the son of the former
living picture. "That horsey know. You stay by him."

The saddle must have been strange to the horsey, for uneasiness
communicated itself from him to me as we set out, an uneasiness
augmented to me by the incessant vicious pricks of the ever-present
_nonos_.

The way led ever higher above the emerald bay of Tai-o-hae set in
the jade of the forest, and valley after valley opened below as the
trail edged upward on the face of sheer cliffs or crossed the little
plateaus of their summits. Hapaa lay bathed in a purple mist that
hid from me the mute tokens of depopulation; Hapaa that had given
Porter its thousands of naked warriors, and that now was devoid of
human beings.

Dipping slightly downward again, the trail lay on the rim of a deep
declivity, a sunless gulf in which the tree-tops fell away in rank
below rank into dim depths of mistiness. There was no sign of human
passing on the vine-grown trail, a vague track through a melancholy
wilderness that seemed to breathe death and decay. A spirit of gloom
seemed to rise from the shadowed declivity, from the silence of the
mournful wood and the damp darkness of the leaf-hidden earth.

I had given myself over to musing upon the past, but suddenly in the
narrowest part of the trail the beast I rode turned and took my
canvas-covered toes in his yellow teeth. A vague momentary flash of
horror came over me. Did I bestride a metempsychosized man-eater, a
revenant from the bloody days of Nuka-hiva? In those wicked eyes I
saw reflected the tales of transmigatory vengeance, from the wolf of
Little Red Riding Hood to the ass that one becomes who kills a
Brahman. I gave vent at the same second to a shriek of anguish and
struck the animal upon the nose, the tenderest part of his anatomy
within reach. He released my foot, whirled, cavorted, and, as I
seized a tree fern on the bank, went heels over head over the cliff.

T'yonny had said to "stay by horsey," but he could not have foreseen
the road he would take. I was sorry for him as I heard the
reverberations of his crashing fall. No living thing could escape
death in such a drop, for though the cliff down which he had
disappeared was not absolutely perpendicular, it was nearly so.
Peering over it, I could not see his corpse, for fern and tree-top
hid all below. At least, I thought, he had surcease of all ills now.
And so I descende