went on savagely. And once he passed a
gang of _camaradas_ laboring to get heavily loaded dugouts up a fiendish
_raudal_. They had ropes out and were hauling at them from the bank,
while some of their number were breast-deep in the rushing water,
pushing the dugouts against the stream.

"They're headed for the plantation," said Bell grimly, "and they'll need
the grace of The Master by the time they get there. And it's abandoned.
But if I tell them...."

Men with no hope at all are not to be trusted. Not when they are
mixtures of three or more races--white and black and red--and steeped in
ignorance and superstition and, moreover, long subject to such masters
as these men had had. Bell had to think of Paula.

He could have landed and haughtily ordered them to float or even carry
the light boat to the calmer waters below. They would have obeyed and
cringed before him. But he shot the rapids from above, with the little
motor roaring past rocks and walls of jungle beside the foaming water,
at a speed that chilled his blood.

* * * * *

Paula said nothing. She was white and listless. Bell, himself, was being
preyed upon by a bitter blend of horror and a deep-seated rage that
consumed him like a fever. He had fever itself, of course. He was
taking, and forcing Paula to take, five grains of quinine a day. It had
been included among his stores as a matter of course by those who had
loaded his boat. And with the fever working in his brain he found
himself holding long, imaginary conversations, in which one part of his
brain reproached the other part for having destroyed the plantation of
The Master. The laborers upon that plantation had been abandoned to the
murder madness because of his deed. The caretakers of the tiny _fazenda_
on the river bank were now ignored. Bell felt himself a murderer because
he had caused The Master's deputies to cast them off in a callous
indifference to their inevitable fate.

He suffered the tortures of the damned, and grew morose and bitter, and
could only escape that self torture by coddling his hatred of Ribiera
and The Master. He imagined torments to be inflicted upon them which
would adequately repay them for their crimes, and racked his feverish
brain for memories of the appalling atrocities which can be committed
upon the human body without destroying its capacity to suffer.

It was not normal. It was not sane. But it filled Bell's mind and
somehow kept