The Jumping Bamboo

by Beatrice Grimshaw

 

The
JUMPING BAMBOO

The Quest of the Sorcerer's Stone
leads to a Strange Death-trap

By

BEATRICE GRIMSHAW

ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHARLES SARKA

TO ENTER an unknown, hostile town in the heart of New Guinea—to have trouble over a village beauty, see a sorcerer restore the dead to life, discover a huge diamond, and be involved in a sudden death—all within twenty-four hours—is adventure enough for any one. Enough even for the Marquis.

It was more than enough for me—I do not go out looking for adventures, any more than I suppose a confectioner's boy would go out looking for cakes; and for the same reason—I am sick of them. I go looking for gold, as a rule; sometimes I 6nd it, and sometimes don't. If I do, I can have a good time with it in Sydney or Melbourne; if I don't, I can look again. But I never saw the adventure that you could pay in over the counter of a bar, or at the box-office of a theatre. Adventures are a nuisance and a hindrance, so far as I have experienced them; and as to going out actually hunting for them——

Well, that was very much what the Marquis was doing. I will say this much for him—he wasn't any sort of a coward. I have seen him cry like a girl; I have seen him shiver with excitement, but I never saw him frightened, and I never saw him give anything the best of it. That would have kept me in his company, even if the big diamond had not.

But now we were inevitably linked by that double interest. It shows what a good sort the Marquis was, that we hadn't a word's dispute as to who found it first, or whose was the right to claim it—if we ever got it. We just assumed that, being in the thing together, it was “halves.” I was to stick to the Marquis, and he to me, till the business was through.

Good Lord! if we had had an idea of how much that meant!...

We were beginning to have an inkling, no more, the morning after the poor little pretty girl had been buried. They carried her away, wrapped in mats, to some burial place m the forest as soon as the daylight broke, and we did not get a chance to examine the corpse, as I had wished to do. That hurried look-over in her own house, when we found her dead, had shown me that there was no obvious trace of injury; but I thought her slightly swollen. I suspected prison—the sorcerers of New Guinea are clever poisoners, and very ready to use their powers. But nothing would ever tell us now.

Under ordinary circumstances I would have cleared out of the town straight away, for I knew well that some kind of trouble was sure to follow such an unlucky introduction. But with a diamond the size of a chandelier-luster knocking about in a sorcerer's bag, within a few yards of us, we were not likely to move on in a hurry.

The Marquis and I, on the morning following that eventful night, held a council of war in front of out tent where we could see all that went on in the village street, and keep an eye on the whereabouts of Mo. So long as we saw him, we knew that he could not be doing much mischief.

The bat-eared little man was not to be seen that day. (I had ascertained through Koppi Koko that the dead girl was his promised wife, and that she had told him, after watching the Marquis dance, that she never would marry an ugly little thing like him.) He was the sorcerer's youngest and favorite brother, so the useful Koppi Koko had found out—being very anxious to retrieve his character, and save himself the hammering that he feared his desertion might bring down on him. I did not touch him as it happened, not because I thought he didn't deserve it, but because I knew he would be more useful if he were kept in suspense.

I thought his information interesting, but by no means reassuring. It was too much to suppose that the matter would be allowed to end there. The little man must have developed a worse grudge against us than against his late unlucky fiancée, and if her fate was an example of what we had got to expect, things were looking lively.

So I told the Marquis. We were sitting on the ground outside our tent and watching the villagers moving about their daily tasks—water-carrying, net-making, wood cutting, fetching sago from the forest, going out to dig yams, or to hunt pig. They looked peaceable enough, and it was a peaceful, pretty scene, with the sun just rising over the tall green palms and the smoke curling thin and blue from under the deep thatch roofs.

But the old hand in New Guinea knows well—too well—that the Papuan is most dangerous when, apparently, most friendly. The quiet aspect of the place meant nothing—or worse.

“There is a feeling of sadness upon me this morning; I have the blooming hump,” said the Marquis, his fat chin resting upon his pink fat hand. “If you offered me the—the big diamond itself—in payment, I could not dance, a step.”

“That's right. I reckon you'd better keep on feeling that way- as long as you can,” I said. “We've trouble enough on our hands without making any more, and your accomplishments do seem to bring the thunder about one's ears, somehow. Mark, let's talk it all out.”

“Perfectly,” said the Marquis, turning his full-moon face round upon me.

“Look here. We've got to get that diamond. And we've got to avoid being poisoned, as the girl was. And we've got to get our carriers out safe with ourselves, and be on our way to the coast inside of a day or so at the most: it isn't healthy to stop here too long.”

“Perfectly. That's right.”

“Well, then, I reckon the sorcerer's not going to go on keeping the diamond where he did, because a blind baby could have seen that we wanted it. We must get some idea of likely hiding-places——”

“Hold a minute. Could we not buy it, quite simply?”

“No, Mark; I've tried.”

“Already?”

“This morning, while you were choosing between your heliotrope shirt with the green tie, and your pink one with the blue, I went and had a talk with the brute—I'd rather have pounded him to a jelly, but you can't always do the thing you ought to do, up-country in Papua. Told him we had a fancy for his magic crystal; said you were a bit of a sorcerer yourself, and would give a lot for it; offered all it was safe to offer. No go; he didn't rise to it worth twopence. You see, if I had shown him all we had, he would simply have looted our stores and had us knocked on the head—or tried to—and anything I offered didn't tempt him, in comparison with the stone. We have pretty short tucker, you know, Mark—I'm not blaming you, for I know' you couldn't afford a big outfit, but there it is: we can't bid high even if it was safe to show everything.”

“But, see then!” exclaimed the Marquis. “Could we not promise him?”

“Oh, you could promise him anything, but he wouldn't believe you. They never keep promises themselves, and can't under stand any one else doing it. And I put it to you: Would even a white man part with something he valued quite a lot, to a couple of strangers, just on a promise?”

“No,” said the Marquis thoughtfully. “Assuredly he would say that a bird in the bush blow's nobody good, and laugh in your nose at you.”

“Well, what I propose to do is just to take the diamond any way we can get it—steal it, if you like to say so—and when we get back to Port Moresby, send him a big equivalent for it—a case of valuable goods of some kind or other. That would be treating him as fairly as we can. Anyhow, there is one thing we aren't going to do, Marky, and that is, leave a chunk of a rough diamond you could break a man's head with knocking loose about Kata-Kata in a sorcerer's bag.”

[Illustration: I HAVE NEVER BEEN CALLED A NERVOUS MAN; BUT I WAS DOWN THE LADDER AND THE STREET ALMOST BEFORE THE MARQUIS]

“I am all of accord with you—no blooming fear!” said the Marquis. “But, Flint, there is one thing that I must not forget, even on account of the diamond—my seek for the occult. Can we not get this Mo to show us more things of his magic?”

“If Mo doesn't intend to show you more of his 'magic' without being asked or wanted, you may call me a yellow Chow,” I said. “Don't you worry about that; you'll get all you want, I reckon.”

We had left the tent now, as it was growling very hot in the village, and we were walking along the bank of the river that ran close beside the street. It was a pretty river, shallow and foamy, and full of big rocks covered with moss and fern. Here and there you could see a pink or purple orchid, and the cocoanuts cast wonderful shadows on the pools.

Just where the shadow was deepest and coolest something stirred in the brown of the water—something that was brown itself, and that glittered with wet. It was Mo, bathing.

I pulled the Marquis back into the shade. “This is luck!” I whispered. “The village is quiet; we can very likely get into Mo's own house, and have a look round. Come on as quick as you can.”

... How still the wide brown street was, under the terrible mid-day sun! Noon is the lonely hour in Papua, when the heat is at its worst; no man stirs about who is not compelled to do so. The women were in the yam fields, taking their mid-day rest from toil beneath the shelter of the bush. The men were loafing about somewhere in the depths of the forest, pretending to hunt. In the town itself there were only a few old people and children, all asleep. The main street was a river of white fire; the shadows beneath the long-legged houses were like pools of tar. Not a dog stirred out from shelter. Not a footstep rustled or a palm-sheath floor gave forth a creak. It was undoubtedly the moment.

We knew where Mo's house was—a fine building with a high-gabled roof, and an extraordinary amount of ornament in the way of carved birds and crocodiles, and fringes of waving fiber. We scuttled up the ladder silently and swiftly, like two thieves and dodged in under the low door. Inside the house was high and cool and empty. A pleasant amber light filtered down from somewhere in the lofty roof; but there were no window's, and the door was buried in the overhanging thatch. Straining our eyes, we looked about us.... Mats, wooden sleeping-pillows shaped like alligators; lime gourds carved and poker-worked; tall shields with devilish faces carved upon them; a string of human skulls, extending from the gable to the floor; a dagger carved from a thigh-bone; dancing-masks made in the semblance of sharks and birds and kangaroos; arrows; pineapple-shaped stone clubs; long, barbed, ebony spears....

In one corner hung the sorcerer's great feather bonnet, taken off for bathing; his ugly human-hand locket was tidily laid away on a rafter. The thick bamboo that we had seen him carrying like a wand lay on the floor—tightly corked up. But what interested us more than anything was the big charm-bag, hung on the wall, and bursting full.

We had it down in a moment, and tumbled the things out on the floor, tossing them recklessly here and there, in the search for our wonderful stone. I took the opportunity of looking at all the quartz crystals it contained—there were a good many—and opening all the little banana-leaf parcels, hoping to find another diamond in the absence of our first discovery, which (I saw almost at once) was not there. But there was nothing.

This did not surprise me much, for Koppi Koko had told me (under pressure of certain threats) that the crystal, which was well known to all the natives, had been the property of innumerable sorcerers from time to time, and had, in all probability, passed about over half Papua. Nothing could be more impossible, in that country of Babel-dialects, than to find out where the stone had originally come from. However, if we could only get hold of it, I was not bothering much about anything else.

“It seems to me,” said the Marquis, drawing himself erect and kicking aside the bag with his foot, “that our friend, Monsieur Mo, is not such a fool as he glitters.”

“That's right,” I answered, looking round again. Rolled-up mats?—gourds?—clay water-pots? Impossible to say. At all events, we might——

[Illustration: THE MARQUIS WAS SITTING UP ON HIS BED, LOOKING WHITE AND DRAWN]

“My God, Flint!” said the Marquis, in a low, horrified voice. “My God of Gods, look at that!”

The flimsy flooring shook as he bounded back toward the door. I jumped back with just in case—and then looked.

The bamboo was rolling about on the floor, and trying to stand on its end!

We stood with our backs against the thatch by the door, breathing very hard, and staring still harder. The thing kept on jumping and rolling. It was rolling toward us.

I have never been called a nervous man; but I was down the ladder and out in the street almost before the Marquis. It has always seemed to me a special Providence that we did not meet, and stick, in the door.

We were scarcely out, and beginning to feel a little foolish—I, for one, had made up my mind already to go back and investigate the thing, sorcery, trick, or whatever it was—when we saw the tall, wet figure of Mo coming up through the trees from the river. It did not seem a happy time to continue our investigations, so we made for the tent, trying to look as if we had only been out for a stroll, and (I dare say) succeeding just about as well as a couple of small boys caught coming away from the fruit garden.

“No go,” I said, flinging myself down on the pile of sacks inside our tent. “Mark, we'll have a smoke and a game of cards, and then we'll go to sleep.”

“What for, to sleep?” asked the Marquis.

“Because I don't propose to sleep much to-night—nor will you. It seems to me that things are given to happening here at night, and I intend to keep a look-out instead.”

“We will sleep, then,” agreed my companion. And we did, after our smoke and our game—all through the burning after noon, until the sun began to drop behind the cocoanuts, and the leather-necks commenced their evening squawking and squabbling, and the smoke of supper fires stole out, smelling pleasant and peaceful and homey and everything that it particularly was not—here in the heart of cannibal Papua, in the sorcerer's town.

When we woke up we were thoroughly rested, for we had slept long and deep, after our broken rest the night before. I called up Koppi Koko, and bade him get the sup per ready. The Marquis yawned, stretched, and sat up on his mat.

“Hallo!” I said. “There's another of your singlets going; you won't have enough clothes to carry you back to Port Moresby, at this rate.” For the Marquis, being big and fat, stretched his clothes terribly, and, in consequence, they were wearing very fast.

“I do feel like a cool window in my back; have a look, kindly,” he said, trying to see over his own shoulder.

I looked at his back. “Mark,” I said, “take off your singlet and look at it. I don't like this.”

I had to peel him out of it, for it had shrunk and was tight. When he was clear, and had the garment on his knee, he gave it one glance, and then looked at me.

“My friend, as I said yesterday, we are in deep waters,” he remarked. “This, while I lay asleep, has been cut. This cut, it has taken out a piece, and the piece is the same size as——”

“As the piece out of the girl's belt,” I finished.

We looked at each other; the leathernecks squawked outside; the dogs of the village began that peculiarly mournful, wolf-like howling that native dogs always do set up about sunset.

“And the girl, the little beautiful, that night she died,” observed the Marquis. He whistled softly to himself: an air I did not know—a crying, sobbing sort of tune it was, and not calculated to raise any one's spirits if they had needed it—which I should have thought the Marquis's might.

“See, I will dance her requiem,” he said. “Perhaps my own, good Flint. One never knows.”

Singing the air gently to himself—I can not describe how mournful and calling-you-to-come-back it sounded, or how the horrid wailing of the native dogs chimed in and became a part—he danced, in the twelve-by-fourteen space of the tent.... I have seen something like it in the Islands, when the warriors were dancing for the funeral of a great dead chief—something, but not so good. It was grief, and death, and despair put into motion, and translated, by the Marquis's huge limbs, into a language that even the Papuans themselves would have understood. All, too, as lightly as—as—well, as the feathers waving in the wind upon a hearse.

When he had done he sat down, and smiles broke out all over his pink, fat face.

“Good, eh?” he said. “That was a funeral dance of prehistoric Crete, that I found among the buried carvings of the palace of Minos, which they have lately——”

“Come back,” I said. “This isn't ancient Crete, it's modern New Guinea, and we're in a hole. Mark, I propose, for to-night, that we let on to go to sleep, but don't—and then we'll see what happens. As for supper. I'm going out to cook that myself. I'm not taking any chances just now..”

“As you wish,” said the Marquis. “But you can not deny that it is all most interesting.”

“Oh, very—damned—interesting,” I said.

“I hope it doesn't get any more so. I'd like a little boredom for a change, if you ask me.” And I went to cook the supper—not that I thought it really necessary, but just in case. One does a lot of things for that reason, in the queer places of Papua.

We had a little coffee in our stores, and I brewed a billy-can full, for I did not want any mistakes made about going to sleep. At the usual hour we put out our light and lay down on the rough sack-beds I had fixed up. The Marquis and I were near enough together to touch each other if we wished. We turn ed in all standing, even to our boots. The carriers were camped in a little hut close by; our stores were mostly piled up in the tent, and we had our revolvers strapped round our waists.

It was arranged that we were to take watch and watch about, for two hours each, and that the man on watch should sit on his bed, not lie. I could guess the time easily enough, and the Marquis thought he could also. In any case, there should be no striking of matches.

The night wore on but slowly. At first there were constant stirrings in the village—talking, squabbling, moving here and there; then the dogs began to fight; then some of the roosters waked up and crowed, and roused out the rest a good many hours too soon. But by degrees the town settled to rest. I had taken the first watch; had lain down—not to sleep)—through the Marquis's; and now my second watch was well on its way.

After a time it grew so still that the silence seemed to tingle, in the way it does when you are awake at night and listening. There was not a breath of wind, no moon, and few stars; the weather had been heavy and thunderous all day, and the sky was clouded. In the triangle made by the opening of the tent I could see—when I had been straining my eyes into the dark for quite a long time—the dim grayness of the village street, and the black bank of palms beyond.

I say there was not a sound, nor anything to see. Seated there on my rough bed, every sense alert, I might have been alone at the end of the world, with the last man dead beside me.

But it came to me, not suddenly, quietly and surely, that we were not alone. I do not know, whence the first warning conveyed itself; it came, however, and I found myself listening and looking expectantly, with a certainty in my mind that something was going to happen.

Sight and hearing are not the only senses that a bushman can use to good effect. I smelt, cautiously and without noise.

There was the marshy odor of the river behind the palms. There was the indescribable smell of a native village—dry, sun-baked earth, insanitary whiffs of decaying stuff, the hay-like odor of old thatch. And something more—the smell of cocoanut-oil, warm and fresh, and very near.

I remembered that the Papuan always oils himself after bathing. I recollected having seen Mo in the river.

Very cautiously I stretched out and touched the Marquis's hand. He was awake—he was not the kind of man to sleep when he ought to have been waking, for all his flummery—and his hand met mine with a squeeze. We listened hard. There was not the ghost of a sound, but the smell grew stronger, passed, and died away. And, just after, the faintest possible shadow crossed the gray of the road.

We listened again, and I for one did not like it, for I knew that whatever Mo had meant to do was done. Then, suddenly, the Marquis's hand caught hold of mine in a grip that was painful.

“Flint, a light!” was all he said. I had my matches in my hand, and I struck one almost before he had done speaking. The Marquis was sitting up on his bed, looking white and drawn.

“It is the 'touch of death,'” he said. “I have felt it—cold as—as nothing but death is cold.” He sat like a statue; his hand had let mine go and was gripping tight to the edge of the bed. I was up in a moment, and looking ail round the tent. There was not a thing to be seen. Having searched, I put out the light again and waited. It is not a good thing to make yourself a target for possible arrows shot in the dark. I could hear the Marquis breathing heavily.

Then, in a moment, he gave a terrible cry, leaped right on to my bed, and brought it and me and himself down to the earth together in one tremendous crash.

There was no use trying to “lie low” after that. I struggled out somehow, lit the hurricane lamp, and asked the Marquis, who was sitting half-dazed in the midst of the ruins, what he supposed had happened.

He was still deadly pale.

“I don't know, my Flint,” he answered, looking at me with the fixed expression of the man who has had a shock. “I know only that the hand of death itself was laid upon me, there in the dark—first it has touched my arm, and then my heart where my clothes were open for the heat.”

“How do you know it was the hand of death?” I asked, getting a bottle of whisky out of one of our swags. “How do you know you weren't asleep after all, and having a bad dream?”

“I was not asleep; you will remember I clasped your hand. And that thing was death, I know, because in these plains where all the time hot there nothing cold at all, and that which has touched me was the cold of

[Illustration: WE STOOD IN THE DARK UNDER THE HOUSE, LOOKING BREATHLESSLY THROUGH THE CRACKS IN THE FLOOR, AND WATCHING MO.]

“Rats! You aren't dead. Have some whisky,” I said, pouring it out.

“Yes, I am escaped; that's what I don't comprehend,” said the Marquis thoughtfully. “That good whisky; that warms the muscles of the heart. Flint—” with a sudden revival—“you can not but must allow, this is the very devil interesting!”

{[dhr]} We were rather sleepy in the morning, I remember—the effect of the coffee having worn off. I had an idea or two as to what course we had best follow for the capturing of the stone; but nothing could be done before midday. So I and the Marquis kept watch for each other to sleep, and we got in a good three hours apiece before noon.

When the white blaze of twelve o'clock was searing the palms once more, and the village folk were away or asleep, and Mo had gone down to the river again to bathe. I beckoned the Marquis out. We wore the rubber-soled shoes that one uses for easy bush-walking, and made not a sound as we passed along the street. The of the palms were ink upon white paper; the dogs slept beneath the houses; the tame cockatoos and parrots drowsed upon the eaves. The heat was awful: it seemed as though the village in its stillness lay dead beneath a torrent of white fire from the implacable sky.

[Illustration: AND MO KNEW IT, LITTLE AS WE THOUGHT IT.]

We gained the sorcerer's house being seen and slipped into the cool interior, gasping like creatures that find water after drought.

“What a day!” choked the Marquis, in a whisper—we feared, somehow, to talk aloud. “You may have thankfulness that you are as lean as a herring, Flint. If you had my weight——”

He sat down on the floor to cool off—and it promptly gave way beneath him. I hauled him out with some trouble, and set him in a safe place.

“I believe that's a trap-door,” I said, looking at it. “Seems to be meant for a hurried get-away in case of trouble. Not a bad idea. I wonder how he came to leave it open.”

We looked about us. The bamboo that had given us such an unpleasant start on the day before was nowhere to be seen. Otherwise the house was the same. Still—whether it was the effect of the alarm in the night, or simply the discouragement that always treads close on the heels of excited hope—I did not feel that we were nearer without our goal. Rather, I felt farther away.

“We must look,” said the Marquis, who evidently did not share my discouragement. “You will look one side of the house, I will look the other, and before Mo will come back——”

He did not finish the sentence, for up the long ladder leading to the door (Mo's house was the highest in the village) came, at that moment, a slowly creaking step.

With one consent we dived through the trap-door and pulled it flat after us. Then we halted under the house, listening and looking eagerly.

“If he doesn't see us—” I whispered,

“I think he can not,” answered the Marquis, cautiously. “But we can see him through these cracks— What chance! What chance!”

... It is long ago now, but to this day I am vexed when I think how easily the greasy old villain took us in—how readily we dropped into his snare. That Mo had been perfectly aware of our visit the day before, that he guessed we would come again, had returned early in order to hurry us out, had left the trap-door open in order that we might go through it and watch him underneath the house—had indeed planned the whole thing from start to finish—never occurred to either of us at the time, though, indeed, we might have guessed that the chief sorcerer of the chief town of sorcery-riddled Kata-Kata was not likely to be quite so simple as he seemed.

At any rate, there we stood in the dark under the house, looking breathlessly through the cracks in the floor, and watching Mo. And Mo knew it, little as we I thought it.

First of all, he took the long bamboo off his breast—it had accompanied him to the river to-day, seemingly—uncorked the top, and looked cautiously in. We could not see what was inside. He put his palm over the opening, and with the other hand drew toward him one of the large clay water-pots standing on the floor. These water-pots narrowed to a mouth about four inches across; some of them had baked-clay lids on the top. He chose one that had a lid, uncovered it, and dropped something in.

Where had he produced it from? The man was like a conjurer. I had not seen anything in his hand a moment before— but it was undoubtedly the great diamond that he dropped into the jar. I even heard tinkle against the hard clay bottom as it fell. The Marquis, in his excitement, pinched my arm so hard that it was black and blue afterward. I knew he was simply boiling with corked-up speech, and I wondered how long he could hold on.

Now the sorcerer, after a hurried look round the empty house (he really was a splendid actor), removed his palm from the top of the bamboo, and inverted it over the jar. We could see by his motions that he was pouring something from the one to the other; it seemed to come slowly, and take some time. When he had done, he put the clay cover on the jar, shook the empty bamboo, and threw it down.

After this he produced a small trade looking-glass, oiled his hair, put feathers in it, painted his face, took his bag of charms off the wall, slung a tall bow on his shoulder, and whistled to his dog. It was plain that he was going hunting—probably courting also, the two occupations often mixing and overlapping a good deal in the Papuan forests.

We waited. We waited till Mo and his dog and his bow and his bag had disappeared down the village street, pale and unsubstantial in the glaring overhead sun. We waited another ten minutes after. Silence: the village slept beneath the fiery enchantment of noon; the birds were voiceless in the forest; the giant leaves hung still.

“Now!” I said, and we crept back through the trap-door.

For a moment we stood silent in the lonely house, the scene of Satan alone knew what deviltries. The hideous dancing-masks grinned at us from the walls; the skulls showed their teeth. The sorcerer's bamboo lay on the floor, empty, open, defying us to solve its mystery. And at our very feet stood the water-jar, its wide-splayed mouth covered only by the lid of baked clay.

Was the prize really in our grasp at last? I hesitated, stretched out a hand, and took it back—stopped, listened....

There certainly was a sound somewhere. It was a familiar sound, and yet I could not say exactly what it was. It was near and it was not near. It was— What in the name of the devil was it?

“See, Flint, I tire of this!” shouted the Marquis suddenly and imprudently. (I judge that he had heard it too, and it and other things had “got on his nerves,” as women say.) “Faint heart gathers no moss—here goes for France, my brave!” He made a dart at the jar and snatched off the lid.

Do you know what is the swiftest thing in the animal kingdom? Did you ever see a brown flash of lightning get up from the ground and strike?

I know, and I had seen just such a thing before. So I didn't have to stop and think. ... The Marquis got my punch fair in the chest; it doubled him up and sent him half across the house. My right hand being thus occupied, I hadn't time to attend to my left and it got in the way. It was on the first joint of the third finger that the snake got me. He held on like a bulldog.

Now, I must have knocked the wind pretty well out of the Marquis, in throwing him out of the way as I did; but you never saw a man recover quicker. He was up on his feet before one would have time to tell of it. He had got a great steel clearing-knife down from the wall (evidently Mo did a bit of coastal trading) in two seconds or thereabouts, and had slashed the snake clean through before I got it shaken off. I pulled its head away then and threw it on the floor. I had had a look at it and saw that there was only one thing to do.

“Give me the knife,” I said. The Marquis gave it, and as I am alive, he was crying crying as he did.

There was nothing to make a fuss about.I had the top joint of the finger off in two clean chops. And there is no finger a man can spare better than the left-hand third.

I tied it up and put a sort of tourniquet on. Then I remembered the diamond—it was not so strange that I'd forgotten it for a minute or two, all things considered— and put my right hand into the jar that had lately held such an unpleasant occupant. I pulled out—not the diamond, hut a bit of common stone tied up in a leaf.

The sorcerer had us again. No doubt he had palmed the jewel, somehow or other, when setting his trap.

I was feeling a bit sick, what with loss of blood and the small amount of poison that had got into circulation before I took the finger off. I was sure now that we had not a chance of getting the stone—as things were. Mo was thoroughly awake, and there was nothing for it but to retreat—[or the present.

“Wait till I come back with an R. M. and a score of armed native constabulary, you heathen beast," I said to myself, “just wait. You've earned what you'll get—richly earned it."

[Illustration: IT WAS ON THE FIRST JOINT OF THE THIRD FINGER THAT THE SNAKE GOT ME.]

“We’ve got to go, Mark," I said aloud. “Get the carriers together for me as quick as you can; it's the best time, with all the people away. If we stay on, there'll be a row to-night as sure as Fate, and the Government don't like unofficial people to do its killing for it. We'll come back, and give them what-for with the chill off. Oh, Lord, don't do that!”

For the Marquis was hanging round my neck—a pretty solid weight—and had already kissed me loudly on both cheeks.

“My brave retainer!” he said, with tears in his voice (I reckoned he meant preserver, but it was all one), “what can I ever do to recompense you of my life that you have saved?”

“I told you what to do just now,” I said. “Get the carriers under way, and sharp. I want to drink some ammonia.”

I did, and it did me good; I was able to walk almost as well as usual in half an hour. I slung my arm up in a long sheaf of grass, and we set off from the village as hard as we could, keeping a look-out for ambushes all the way. But the noonday hush lay on all the forest and the track, and there was not a sign of life.

When we were an hour or two away, I halted for a rest; the bite was getting at me a little, and I felt slightly giddy, though I knew by now that there was no danger.

“Tell me, what was all this thing that has happened?” demanded the Marquis, dropping on a log at my side and fanning him self with his hat. “I am bursting of curiosity, but I would not disturb you.”

“Well,” I said, “if I had known Kata-Kata as I know other districts in New Guinea, none of them would have happened at all. The whole thing might have been foreseen. It's true I had heard silly yarns about this part of the country, but I didn't believe them, they seemed so exaggerated—and they quite went out of my head, anyhow, for I was hardly more than a kid when I did hear them. But I've remembered them to-day.”

“What were they, then?”

“People—natives, I mean—said that the Kata-Kata sorcerers knew how to tame snakes and make them like dogs, and that the brutes would bite any one their masters told them to. The sorcerers would get a bit of a man's clothing, taken next his skin where it had the scent of his body, and worry and tease the snake with it so that it would know the smell, and hate it. And then they said the sorcerer would let loose his snake at night in the house of the man he wanted to kill, and the brute would bite him, and the sorcerer would get it and take it home again before he was seen.”

“Taubada, true you talk,” broke in Koppi Koko, who was squatting on the ground close to us, chewing betel-nut most contentedly. “That puri-puri man, he take him snake all the time 'long one bamboo, carry him along him chest.”

“That accounts for the milk of the cocoanut,” I said. “What a pair of babies to be scared by a stick with a snake in it, hopping about! Of course, the thing heard people and was trying to get loose.”

“Yes, and the snake—the cold snake—that was the touch of death last night—not?”

“Very nearly,” I said. “The general smash you made saved your life, Marky.”

“And the little beautiful, and the piece cut out of her belt—yes, now one sees all,” said the Marquis, musingly. “Flint, this is a devil of a country of yours; but, on my soul, it is interesting. What adventures!”

“I take no stock in adventures,” I said. “I'd rather keep out of them. But I reckon, somehow, there's more ahead before we get that stone.”

The third story of the quest of the "Sorcerer's Stone” will appear in the October number.