n single file along a faintly discernible track
is an eerie proceeding if you are not used to the Sunderbunds.

True, in this jungle there are no serpent-like creepers festooned from
tree to tree to impede your progress, or luxuriant and rank vegetation
to hide snakes and other poisonous reptiles; neither is there a canopy
of thick dark leaves above to obliterate the light of day, or the stars
at night.

But the space between the crowding sundri trees which predominate, is
packed with an undergrowth of light shrubs through which you have to
force and tear your way if you lose the track; and you trip and twist
your ankle at every step on the abominable sundri breathers which
thrust themselves through the soil at every inch, and vary in thickness
from a stick of vermicelli to a good stout bough.

"Look," will whisper your _shikari_ as he sinks silently to the ground;
and look you do with all your eye-power, and yet fail to see the
spotted deer gazing at you, motionless from sheer fright, only a few
yards away in the undergrowth, so at one is the animal's colouring with
the dappled shadows on the leaves.

What depths of humiliation you plumb when the deer flees to safety
through the trees and your _shikari_ sighs.

Leonie as a gun had proved a dire, undiluted failure.

As a companion no one could beat her. Nothing tired her, nothing
dismayed her. The terrific heat, the untoward hours and meals, the
sting of mosquito, and the rip of the thorn left her unmoved.

She and Edna Talbot had gleefully climbed the ladder up to one of the
two _suapattah_ huts, which are a kind of shelter of leaves built for
the sundri wood collector upon high platforms near the water, and in
which they had passed their first vermin-stricken night. They had
climbed cheerfully down the next morning without a word of complaint
about the hours of torture they had endured as they sat at the hut door
in the light of the moon, whiling away the time until the jungle cocks
should crow by watching various shapes come down to the creek to drink.

But the first time a deer, hypnotised by fear or curiosity, had stood
stock-still before her, simply asking for death, Leonie put her gun
down and shook her head.

"I can't," she said sturdily. "I simply _could not_ kill except in
self-defence."

And although young Dean sighed lugubriously over his lady's
defalcation, Jan Cuxson adored her utterly for her womanliness, and
translated the remark the head