like apertures in the sides of gun-barrels ; he dropped the the creatures the air issued in gun in his confusion, and dared sharp whistling jets. not stoop to regain it. A lunge of his fist caught one of them in mid-air, leaping at his face, and flung it aside, but almost immediately a fierce stabbing pain in his calf told him that he was overtaken. He was losing blood rapidly now, and could scarcely hobble. The fate of the yellow dog, the fate of the sucked hare . only a very little farther, and he would be clear of that deathtrap... if he could only make his pal hear... God help him! there were three more of them hopping to meet him up the gutter a mist in his eyes, The terrier, he was now convinced, was dead, and noticing a decreasing violence in its murderers' efforts, he determined to wait till they were gorged and less active, then to dash past them down the ravine to rejoin his companion on the track below. At this moment, however, a diversion occurred with the approach of a third "beetle " towards the corpse of the dog. It progressed in short leaps, like a monstrous cricket, chirruping as it sprung. And from behind and above him, from the burrows with which, to his horror, he now saw the cliffs were riddled, came answering chirpings. The ravine was alive with them. Black gleaming eyes and questing beaks were pointed at him from the mouth of every hole. In his terror he aimed rapidly at the third insect and pulled the trigger. The charge, he swears, struck the creature full in the face, hurling it on its back. Screeching horribly, it spun round and round in impotent fury, and the stench emitted by it was nauseating. As he rose to run for his life, a heavy object dropped on his shoulders and fell at his feet. Before it could right itself, he had blown it to fragments with his second barrel. While his shaking fingers were fumbling with another couple of cartridges, he felt his boot seized. He shook it frantically as he ran, screaming for help; he beat at the brute with his a voice ten thousand miles away, then a horror of black darkness. Weeks later-he had no idea how many-he came to himself in a hospital of a large town on the railway; he could not remember its name; he had no memory for anything now. Some one there gave him a letter from his mate, which he had lost long ago. Price and three or four villagers, to whom the dredgerman had called for help from their fields, had heard his cries, and running to his aid had found him lying at the mouth of the ravine. There were three of the foul creatures clasping one of his legs, sucking. These the villagers smashed with their ironbound "lathis," bursting them like eggs. They were familiar with the brutes, which, they said, as a rule, moved by night only, and never came down from the gorge into the plain. That's the fist I got the one in the air with. Fat lot of use I was when I come down to the docks again, one hand half-rotted away and one leg as good as gone. But it wasn't that I cared for." "I know," said I desperately, "but what had the doctor at that hospital to say when you told him all about it? " "Goo-goo baby-talk,' he replied, with a windy gush of profanity. You've had a ter rible time, my poor man, and we'll talk more about it when you're yourself again.' There wasn't one of them there that believed me, never a one but the poor little sweeper-boy who did the dirty work of the hospital. He knew. 'Ghoonches,' he said they were. He could talk a tidy bit of English.' 'But," said I, "there was Price; he could have confirmed your story." But the dredging work in the harbour had been suddenly countermanded, in circum stances, as I recalled, familiar to every white man east of Suez; and Price, before his companion had even reached the Bombay hospital, to which the up-country surgeon had sent him, half-cured, had left for Basra, to take up a job on the lower Tigris. Hodson had never seen or heard from him again. "Black and white," he continued faintly, "there's a million souls in this village, I reckon, and if there's one thing they're all agreed on, it is that I'm a liar. The first time I told my mates at the docks about it, they winked and slapped their legs, and 'Tell it us all over again,' says they, ' when you've had a little something to freshen up your memory. That's the way it's been ever since. I'm Beetle Hodson, as good as a theayter and better, when he's had a drop. Say, if you were a cripple out of a job in this climate, and free drinks put up to you all day and half quivering gleams of gold, and from Colaba Point to the crest of Malabar Hill wound a fiery dragon five miles long, guarding the city from the sea. Its jewelled hood was reared high among the dusty stars. Its body, which was the Queen's Road, seemed to heave and stir under the crawling lines of lighted carriages and motors. 66 Who shall set a limit to imagination," I pondered," and a sick fancy, aflame with drink; in what dark valleys may it not wander till, by sheer force of recurrence, dream take the place of reality, and the light within a man become a darkness set on fire from hell? " But there was no exit for me by that door. And Price was in Mesopotamia, and in some unknown town, south of Delhi, north of Bombay, lived a little sweeper who spoke a tidy bit of English, and knew. 66 "Both of you asleep!" said the incredulous voice of the Ward Sister, in the semi-darkness by my head. And is it tomorrow or to-day? Never in my life have I overslept myself so disgracefully. And what does his being so quiet mean?' "There's boar-constrictors a thousand times bigger than the biggest snake in all England. Price he's seen one. Nobody I knows on calls him a liar. And there's elephants and whales and tortoises a man can ride on . . . and what-not. so .. and what-not. And I've spoke the truth all my life, never had no call not to no better than a little lying Rammysammy now, me an Englishman biggest snake I ever set eyes on was in a chalkcutting one summer, Petersfield way. I shifted my fingers gently and felt his wrist. The harbour was a gulf of liquid darkness freaked with spots and "I think," said I, "you had better ring up your doctor. Your patient is not likely to give you much more trouble. If he wakes, ask him to repeat to you what I have just heard from his lips. Tell him I believed every word of it, and am going to write about it to the papers. Promise." She promised, and on the next day I sailed. THE ELUSIVE TRAIL. BY CYRIL W. DAVSON. XIII. THE RETURN JOURNEY. KNOWING how to rest is a great art. Merely conserving one's energy, refraining from using it, is the negative method of the sluggard. Yet we cannot exactly generate it. We must absorb it from nature, and the body will do that if the mind is at peace. The blood will flow if the arteries and nerves are not tensed by mental obstructions. "Let not the sun go down on thy wrath." No, nor your worries. A single day is a gift; take it as such, and leave the morrows to themselves. I think our mental outlook is much what we make it, and largely irrespective of conditions or countries. Emerson says no change of climate will ever hide a defect in character. Parallax and astigmatism have their origin frequently in the soul. The mind can squint as well as the eye, and when it does, the whole man is askew. Self-discipline is the only discipline, but it does not mean a military attitude of mind, a mere parade of precision. Nature doesn't strut, yet she is precise and orderly. She lives in the present with Time. I will not say that she does not look ahead, but she certainly does not run ahead, and that's what Chatsworth was always doing. He did not merely, like the conscientious man he was, think out the morrow's work, but tried to snatch at it that very night before time had ripened it on the slow tree of Cause and Effect. He lived ahead of time. The nights were wasted hours. He must push on-he had work to do. So has Nature-vast work, but she never hurries. Thus he used to pass from Mosquitia in the day, to Insomnia at night, a hard and sleepless land, where the stars shine like cold unsympathetic gems, and where mind and body are drained of their energy. on. The next day we journeyed Chatsworth was listless, but did not show it. Stern discipline braced his nerves— mind over matter, but that's the snag. Matter always wins when time is her ally. Our pace got slower; we were now behind the great lagoon. The country was sodden. The animals began to labour through the marshy land; then a few steps; their feet sank into the treacherous ground, and a dead stop. They could not go a step farther. They would break their legs. We must turn back or walk, and Chatsworth's condition did not warrant the latter. Moreover, there A was the problem of food. man could not carry that packing-case for days and days through a marsh, and there lay our prime error. We ought to have accustomed ourselves previously to living on black beans; then had they suited us, we could have attempted that further journey. Our own foods were palatable but not portable, and under these conditions such a drastic change of diet could easily have caused serious mental and physical reactions. In the distance we saw a village squatting by the side of a big swamp, whose iridescent and slimy waters stared at us like a huge eye. Leaving the muleteers in charge of the animals, we all started off on foot to visit it. One could hardly hope in such a spot for geological exposures, but you never quite know. It was farther than it looked, and we arrived bathed in perspiration. The village was deserted. There was only one grimy inhabitant -the half-eaten carcase of a dog. At our approach a flapping of wings, and several dark objects flew away. Nature's sanitary squad. The nomads had gone-gone before starvation had exterminated them and spreading their filthy litter like some eczema over the fair face of the wilderness. But enough of this No Man's Land, since we could not go on nor pry beneath that impenetrable cloak. We would hie ourselves back to civilisation. About turn! And we tramped our weary way through that mire back to the horses. A slow jaunt for many hours brought us past our balmy resting-place of the previous night, and finally we set up camp near the river. In the morning we reached the Patuca, stepped on board the launch, and puffed slowly upstream, closely examining the banks, and effecting a landing now and again to search for some scrap of evidence. By this means we were able to explore considerably farther up the river, but it was gradually getting shallower. Then a bump, and we stuck! We managed to get her off again and continue the journey, threading our way between the shoals which were spreading across the whole river, but eventually we were obliged to turn. To have gone farther up into the rising country would have been a big task, paddling in canoes and continually hauling them over shoals, for our purpose not an economic proposition. So we swung round, and crept slowly and cautiously through the shoals to the open river, where, under the influence of current and motor, away we sped. At this pace we did not take many hours to reach the Toum Roum, the tributary which we had previously travelled up with such labour. Now across Brewer's Lagoon, and by evening we arrived at our pestilential spot |