s."

"There was Le Petit, Sir Godfrey," replied the deliberate voice. "He
declared over his signature that he had seen them."

"But who believed Le Petit," continued the other. "The world took him
to be a French imaginist like Chateaubriand... who the devil, Bramwell,
supposed there was any truth in this old story? But by gad, sir, it's
true! The water color shows it, and if you turn it over you will see
that the map on the back of it gives the exact location of the spot.
It's all exact work, even the fine lines of the map have the bearings
indicated. The man who made that water color, and the drawing on the
back of it, had been on the spot.

"Of course, we don't know conclusively who made it. Tony had gone in
from the West coast after big game, and he found the thing put up as
a sort of fetish in a devil house. It was one of the tribes near the
Karamajo range. As I told you, we have only Tony's diary for it. I found
the thing among his effects after he was killed in Flanders. It's pretty
certain Tony did not understand the water color. There was only this
single entry in the diary about how he found it, and a query in pencil.

"My word! if he had understood the water color, he would have beaten
over every foot of Africa to Lake Leopold. And it would have been the
biggest find of his time. Gad! what a splash he'd have made! But he
never had any luck, the beggar... stopped a German bullet in the first
week out.

"Now, how the devil, Bramwell, do you suppose that water color got into
a native medicine house?"

The reflective voice replied slowly.

"I've thought about the thing, Sir Godfrey. It must have been the work
of the Holland explorer, Maartin. He was all about in Africa, and he
died in there somewhere, at least he never came out... that was ten
years ago. I've looked him up, and I find that he could do a water
color--in fact there's a collection of his water colors in, the Dutch
museum. They're very fine work, like this one; exquisite, I'd say. The
fellow was born an artist.

"How it got into the hands of a native devil doctor is not difficult
to imagine. The sleeping sickness may have wiped Maartin out, or the
natives may have rushed his camp some morning, or he may have been
mauled by a beast. Any article of a white man is medicine stuff you
know. When you first showed me the thing I was puzzled. I knew what
it was because I had read Le Petit's pretension... I can't call it a
pretension now; the things