n profound
darkness. Then Makola appeared before him, saying quietly: "Come along,
Mr. Kayerts. He is dead." He burst into tears of gratitude; a loud,
sobbing fit of crying. After a time he found himself sitting in a
chair and looking at Carlier, who lay stretched on his back. Makola was
kneeling over the body.

"Is this your revolver?" asked Makola, getting up.

"Yes," said Kayerts; then he added very quickly, "He ran after me to
shoot me--you saw!"

"Yes, I saw," said Makola. "There is only one revolver; where's his?"

"Don't know," whispered Kayerts in a voice that had become suddenly very
faint.

"I will go and look for it," said the other, gently. He made the round
along the verandah, while Kayerts sat still and looked at the corpse.
Makola came back empty-handed, stood in deep thought, then stepped
quietly into the dead man's room, and came out directly with a revolver,
which he held up before Kayerts. Kayerts shut his eyes. Everything was
going round. He found life more terrible and difficult than death. He
had shot an unarmed man.

After meditating for a while, Makola said softly, pointing at the dead
man who lay there with his right eye blown out--

"He died of fever." Kayerts looked at him with a stony stare. "Yes,"
repeated Makola, thoughtfully, stepping over the corpse, "I think he
died of fever. Bury him to-morrow."

And he went away slowly to his expectant wife, leaving the two white men
alone on the verandah.

Night came, and Kayerts sat unmoving on his chair. He sat quiet as if
he had taken a dose of opium. The violence of the emotions he had passed
through produced a feeling of exhausted serenity. He had plumbed in one
short afternoon the depths of horror and despair, and now found repose
in the conviction that life had no more secrets for him: neither had
death! He sat by the corpse thinking; thinking very actively, thinking
very new thoughts. He seemed to have broken loose from himself
altogether. His old thoughts, convictions, likes and dislikes, things he
respected and things he abhorred, appeared in their true light at last!
Appeared contemptible and childish, false and ridiculous. He revelled
in his new wisdom while he sat by the man he had killed. He argued with
himself about all things under heaven with that kind of wrong-headed
lucidity which may be observed in some lunatics. Incidentally he
reflected that the fellow dead there had been a noxious beast
anyway; that men died every da