of Jim White-how I- But I'll tell you. They tried one of their easy governors at first-one of their professional younger sons. It didn't do."

He stopped walking and touched the inspector's sleeve.

"Look about you! I am governor, but this is the work of Hyatt Carnes."

The moon rode higher. In the vast white illumination the sea recovered the memory of the colors of day-phantom purples, ghostly turquoise. The shadows of palm-boles lay across the beach, like a tiger's skin; between the trees clusters of pale, heavy-lipped flowers stirred in the slow wind.

"It is beautiful," Loomis breathed, as if against his will.

The governor took in his look of admiration, half nerves, half awe.

"But not that!" he cried. "Beauty, yes! But one grows tired of beauty; sometimes one has a fearful thirst almost for ugliness-for something cold and hard won and tawdry. No, this is what I mean; this town. This whole island, sir; the villages, the parish schools, the little estates of sugar and cocoa and limes. Seventeen thousand pounds sterling in exports per annum, sir! Seventeen thousand pounds!"

He stood so for a moment with his hands lifted.

"And that, sir, is what your murderer bas done!"

"But I say!" Loomis shifted uneasily. "Hang take it, sir! I'm not the judge. I'm a machine! I'm set to do a task. I do it."

On the gravel before the house a small Welsh mare stood mourning over her own shadow, her legs propped apart, her head drooping. The governor wheeled to face his companion.

"Mr. Loomis, I am going to put nothing between you and Jim White. In return I ask a favor. This: Until you have definitely to act, will you be so good as to say nothing of your errand; will you study this man as a man; and thenWell, will you talk with me again?"

It was a moment before Loomis spoke.

One

Jim White was seated at a long, bare mahogany table, under the light of a candelabrum. Before him was a glass, a decanter of St. Croix rum, several limepeels, and an empty soda-bottle. . . . Here was a man with whom low latitudes and exile had not dealt kindly. could see by the dry luster of the eyes and the color of the skin stretched over the skull structure that long coping with fevers had not been without its price; more than by anything else his physical and mental ebb told in his nerves, his thin, arid, uncontrollable outbursts of temper.

He got to his feet unsteadily at sight of the governor in the door. He pounded on the table with his open palms.

"Yes, I'm here! Look at me all you want!"

His voice was shrill with defiance. He pounded harder.

"No, by God! Tom, I won't be scolded to-night. The mist settled in Two Roads three nights ago. The fever struck before morning. The valley's astink with it. And I've come out. Here you see me, sitting in a clean room, drinking cold rum and soda, having a fine time."

The governor had not moved from the doorway. He spoke slowly.

"I suppose, then, that Jenks and Slowboy must be down with it, else of course you would have sent one of them out instead."

"Talk! Talk like a curate all you damn well please!"

The fellow's ecstasy was shocking. He

showed his teeth. He pounded harder on the table. He danced on his toes. "Talk, talk, talk!”

The governor approached the table. His voice was quiet, austere:

"Now, sir, have the goodness to tell me what you're grousing about."

"I? Oh! Ha-ha! Why should I grouse? Isn't everything just too splendid in there? Only seventeen down, and as for ice, you know-"

"So! That's better!" The governor took up a pad. "Ice, eh!"

But

"Ice-bags, douches, quinine. why should one grouse about quinine?" "Ice bags," the governor wrote, "douches, quinine-"

"Brooms, mops, formaldehyde-'

The governor looked up from his list. "Quite right. And now, Jim, go to bed.

...

Pollett! I say, Pollett, show Mr. White up to the west chamber. Where's Gabriel? Ah, Gabriel, here, this list. Look alive, will you!. Make up a good stock, pack a camp, turn out Potter, Snaith, Washington, and Coco. Tell Fox I shall want horses in front within the hour. . . . Pollett, you've not shown Mr. White up yet. . . . Jim, go! . . . Mr. Loomis — I'm afraid for a few days White, as you see, is quite done, and I shall have to go in and do the best I can, myself. For a few days, then, if you'll have the goodness to forgive my absence-"

"For a few days," Loomis broke in upon the apologies, "I don't fancy I shall get much of White, either. So, if you don't mind, I think I'd rather go along. Shouldn't mind seeing the country." The governor bent his head to one side and studied him.

"As you please," he said. "And about White, you're quite right. I fancy you wouldn't see much of the impossible fellow here."

Loomis did not take the full significance of this till, about an hour later, the moonlit cavalcade came up into the shadow of the island jungle. And there, like a school-boy not to be left behind, Jim White awaited them, leaning on the

neck of his prop-legged pony. Nothing was said on either side as he joined. He fell in at the rear. He remained silent. He seemed chastened, listless, burned out.

To the northerner that night ride over the tangled buttresses of the Morne was something not to be forgotten. The damp heat hanging under the leaves lay heavy in his lungs. The effect, paradoxically, was a sharpening of all the faculties. A million infinitesimal stirrings, cries, snappings, ululations, came to his ears through the forest walls; even in the pauses in travel there was no silence. His eyes glimpsed a multitude of things like serpents in the spotted light-creepers and lianas looping tree to tree. Or at long intervals the jungle sank away, giving up vast little savannas rolling down blue in the moon to hide away in mist-pools. Once there was a sight of the mountain and a ravine, and white mist flowing down the ravine to fill the lower levels, where it lay like the beaten white of an egg.

"That, sir," the governor pointed out, "that's the rotten stuff!"

"God's curse and the devil's curse, too, be on it!"

White had come up from the rear; the malediction was his. A curious change had come over him. It was as if his fragile anger had returned, and yet it hadn't the quality of anger. The man looked rapt. An unhealthy eagerness drew him forward.

"See there!" His heels beat weakly at the pony's belly. "That's Two Roads just there, buried deep. God's damnation on it! choking the beggars in their beds. Tom, I say, are we all lame? Why do we want to be all night about it?"

It had been pretty near that, in truth; the moon was low, and although there was no light in the east, yet there was the feeling of pause in the air which comes before the sudden tropic dawn.

White's heels kicked with an increased, spasmodic violence; a wave of color ran hot over his cheeks; his eyes grew larger.

"Come, Tom! Damn it! Spur up. We must get down to them!" The governor

"Take care, Jim!" turned in his saddle.

"Care? Hell! I'm going. I tell you Tom, I—"

The governor, leaning over quickly, caught the limp form and dragged it to him from the shying pony.

"Boys," he called back, "break out the camp under the road here. Get the wall-tent up straight away! Mr. White is ill."

Watching him as he got down with his sagging burden, Loomis saw on the governor's face a look of bewilderment, horror, and grief.

The tent was pitched. Dawn broke over the mountain, a white devastation. Loomis, uncertain precisely what to do with himself, heard the thin dribble of the sick man's delirium creeping out beneath the tent-flaps. After a moment the governor himself emerged. In the midst of the ordered confusion-negroes panting under tent-rolls and cases, animals backing and snorting-there was something in the look of the short, greenfaced, white-clad figure which seemed to say that he, too, for the moment, was uncertain precisely what to do with himself. He looked at the sky, the immeasurably empty dome of blue. He stared down the gently sloping savanna at the mist that had swallowed the village. The attention of his ears seemed to go back to the low-walled tent and the frail bumble of words without meaning. He wheeled and saw above him Loomis. . . . He came at something like a rush. Loomis had the strong but indefinable sense that he was being charged upon. And then the man seemed to have lost hold of what he had been going to say. An awkward silence fell between them. "He is very bad?" Loomis inquired at last.

"He will die."

The complete, dry acceptance in the tone was shocking. For perhaps the first time in his life Loomis found himself stammering.

"No! Thanks!" The governor lifted both arms in a disordered gesture. "See here, my dear chap, you must get out. The road we came by has no branchings; in daylight you should not miss your way; you should be at Government House by early afternoon. I will be there in a few days-four at most. Till then-"

Loomis, weighing the change which had come over the dignified, almost phlegmatic executive, did not move.

"I prefer to stay," he said, quietly.

"And I-" The governor grasped the horse's bridle. “I-I won't hear of it. There's danger here. I tell you, Loomis, I'll not have another agent's disappearance laid at my door, or at Jim White's. If it weren't for that you might jolly. well-❞

999

"But it isn't 'for that.' Loomis spoke slowly, watching the other's eyes. "For there's no danger here, above the mist. As you told me yourself, so long as one keeps clear of that-"

He dropped it, at sight of the other's face. One could see the man was not himself; that his reserve was shattered, and that he was ashamed of himself and of what he was doing-a man forced to quibble in the presence of tragedy. Gratuitously, and of a sudden, Loomis retreated from his position.

"Well, your Excellency, have it as you wish."

Lifting the reins, he turned the animal back into the trail.. Within the minute he was swallowed by the green flood of the jungle.

That a man like Loomis should have surrendered his position so quietly should have been matter for suspicion. The fact was that he had not; he had simply avoided what is known in domestic affairs as a scene." After a hundred yards he pulled up. He found a place where the leaf screen thinned on

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