I found myself "up the railroad," as we used to say, in a well-remembered town. It had not changed since I saw it last. The railroad still ran through it, straight as a pencil-stroke ruled across the flat lands, and the rails, on their embankment, shimmered in the sun like two unending bars of white-hot metal. The cart road still wallowed into it, and out of it, for the town is set on an island in the marshy level of the paddies. The crazy huts of nipa, and crazier, decaying houses, still stood thick on either side of the one street.  
And brown women in skirts of gaudy calico still sat under the shadow of wide shutters, dispensing such goods as Poverty can buy, while their babies and their pigs rolled comfortably together in the dust. The shaggy thatch still rustled in the sultry breeze, and a few dejected palm-trees clicked their branches as of old. And, very far away across the waveless green sea of the half-grown rice, the same dark and threatening mountains towered into the clouds. It was all unchanged. The merciless sun struck down just as hotly. The very smells were smells I had often smelled before.
 
Suddenly there was a stir of excitement in the town. The women crawled from the litter of their wares. The men, lighting fresh cigarettes from the remnants of their old ones, stood up to gaze. For down the street was coming, with the curious in-toeing shuffle of a barefoot mountaineer, a squat, huge-muscled, naked man.
 
He carried a long, broad-bladed spear in his right hand, and a head-axe was thrust through his belt, and at his back a bag, swollen as if it held something big and round, bobbed and dangled heavily, and something dripped from it slowly, thickly, in the dust. The man's broad, sweat-streaked face was all agrin with excitement and good-nature, but the natives of the town shrank back from him as he passed. "Donde 'Mericanos?" he kept asking eagerly.
 
A bystander pointed to a house, one a little taller than the others, where a flag of dingy white, barred with dingier red and blue, hung drooping, and a group of tall, lean, sun-bronzed men dressed in frayed shirts of blue flannel, and breeches of stained and faded khaki, and battered campaign hats, were lounging in the dusty shade. The bystander pointed to them, and the naked man, his face stretching in a wider grin, broke into a clumsy trot and ran to them.
 
"Me got," he said, and pulled the heavy, bobbing bag from his shoulders, and thrust it at them. They fell back hastily. "It's something, all right," said one of them judicially. "Something plenty dead. Sergeant," he called, "I reckon it's your deal. Here's an Igaroot with another dead-head lookin' for you." And the others laughed.
 
At that an oldish man with a long, drooping, gray moustache, and gray eyes that were bright below their sun-burned lids, stepped from the door. The naked man cried out again, "Me got," and held out his dripping bag. And the saturnine old sergeant fell back, as the men had done.
 
"You open it, Johnnie," he commanded. "It's too dead for me. Patay, sabe? Me no likum thataway. Icao abieria."
 
So the man undid the string that bound his bag, and opened it, and the sergeant took one peep inside. "It's a big American nigger, all right," he announced. "And he's sure dead. It might be him. Better call the Captain over here, some one; I don't reckon he wants that in his quarters. Where you catch him, hombre?"
 
The little man jerked his chin over his shoulder at those distant mountains. "You buy?" he asked anxiously.
 
"You'll get the reward all right, if it's him," said the sergeant reassuringly. "But you'll have to wait till it's identified. There've been a lot of duplicates brought in, sabe."
 
Presently other men in khaki and flannel, who in spite of their undress showed, somehow, as officers, came down the street, and they, and the sergeant, and the man with the bag, went into the house.
 
After a long wait, an orderly came out, pale and shaken, and turned toward the military telegraph station. "It's him," he said briefly, to his waiting fellows. "That Contract Dentist in there knowed him by his teeth. God! I'm plumb glad I ain't no kind of medico."
 
The men looked at each other, silently, for a long minute. The spirit of jesting seemed to have left them. The judicial one spoke first. "Well, he got his good and hard at last," said he. "But he sure got a run for his money."
 
Then I understood what it was all about. I wrote of that thing in the bag once, not knowing it then for a pawn in the Game of the Little Gods. There was a time when men called it Fagan.
 
While Fagan was still a kinky-haired youngster, clad only in the traditional shirt, a question forced itself on his attention. "Why ain't I got a pappy?" he asked his mother, and the great, deep-bosomed woman laughed the deep, melodious laugh of her race.
 
"Lawszee, honey, I raickon you has," she replied. "Mos' chillen has."
 
"Who is my pappy?" the child persisted.
 
The woman laughed again. "Lawszee, chile, how you spaik me to 'maimber that? I'se got other things to 'maimber, I raickon."
 
We couldn't expect much of a Fagan, born of that race and class, and he learned not to expect much of us. A bit of food, a bit of clothing, and a chance to roll around on the levee with the other pickaninnies, and bask in the sunshine and sniff the sweety-sour smells from the sugar-ships, sufficed him. For many years these pleasures were his for the taking. And as he grew older they still sufficed, with the addition of a little cheap tobacco and cheaper gin, and he found that a modicum of labor and a care never to offend one of the heaven-born white race would procure them. The labor was easy, for the son of the deep-bosomed, supple-limbed woman had grown, as the rank, free growth of a swamp shoots up, into a great, broad, graceful man to whom the toil of others was mere play. And he was of a nature so easy-going and joyous and childishly obliging that the heaven-born pointed him out with approval as "a nigger like we had before the war."
 
He might have lived on thus indefinitely, but one day, over a lazy roll of the dice, another black man took advantage of his known good nature. And Fagan, the kindly, felt a sudden, blinding impulse to strike. The huge black fist shot out like lightning under the impulse of the supple, writhing muscles, and the other man dropped with a broken neck.
 
Then Fagan came to the Army, and the Army received him with joy. The surgeon's eye glistened with an artist's fervor as he thumped and kneaded the great, perfect animal, and a wise old recruiting sergeant guided the pen for him to sign his name. Thus he was made welcome in that most catholic of societies, which cares not a whit for your past, your present, or your future, so long as you have mind and body sufficient to obey orders.
 
But even this slight requirement was much for Fagan. His careless, soapless, buttonless existence was a poor training for the rigid minuti? of military life. And he was unfortunate in his immediate commander. Most of the officers of the Fifty-fourth were of the South, able to deal firmly yet kindly with the big black children committed to their charge. But Sharpe was new to the Army, the son of a small tradesman in the North, and had an exalted reverence for the Regulations, and his own rank. So when he saw that the buttons of Fagan's blouse were uncleaned, one morning at guard-mounting, he did not announce the fact impersonally, as an officer should.
 
And Fagan, in serene ignorance of any law against immediate explanation, replied with boyish, surprised chuckle, "Lawszee, Lootenant, I raickon I plumb forgot them buttons."
 
"That's enough," snapped the officer. "Sergeant, put this man under arrest."
 
Fagan followed to the guard-house, mildly expostulant. "He suah'd orter give me a fairah show," he said to the sergeant. "I was jus' a gwine to tell him. I didn't mean no hahm. All I wanted was a fayah show."
 
 "All I wanted was a fayah show." 
"All I wanted was a fayah show."
Thus began a series of petty persecutions. Fagan, with his good nature, tried his best, but the Lieutenant would not be pleased. He was not a bad sort in intent, simply a common, weak, official bully. Such men usually resign early, or if they linger on in the service, learn to shun getting in front of their men when there is firing.
 
By the time the regiment was ordered to the Philippines Fagan's record loomed black with five trials. But the campaigning brought relief. A man was required only to have his rifle in good condition, and be on hand to use it. The regiment spent weary days, dragging about like a slow snake under the burning sun, soaking and shivering in the mists of evening, till men began to sicken. But not Fagan. His melodious bellow would ring triumphant along the lines each night, "I'se been wo'okin' on the ra'alroad," and cheer the drooping men, till the voices of the company wits were demanding, "Who's dat ar white man got a ra'alroad?"
 
And then, one day, the scouts reported that the main body of the enemy was near, that elusive body for which the regiment had been groping so long. After a little the snake broke out into a fan, and went crawling across a muddy rice-paddy toward a cane-brake. Then a flight of strangely drawling insects sang overhead, and as always, when firing is wild and high, some men in the reserve, 'way in the rear, lay down very suddenly.
 
The merry bugles rattled, and the fan dissolved into a thin brown line of men who advanced swiftly to the edge of the brake, firing as they went. And then, all at once, the brake was alive with dizzily flashing steel. A little brown man rose in front of Fagan, and a flash darted straight at his head. Instinctively his muscles reacted, and he ducked backward like a boxer. So the bolo missed his head, but the sharp point, tearing downward, ripped through shirt and flesh on his breast.
 
Fagan stared stupidly at the dripping red edges of the blue cloth till the sharp tingle of the flesh stirred him. As before, he felt a blinding impulse to strike, and whirled his heavy rifle in one hand, as a boy might a stick. He looked down at the quivering, moaning thing before him, and a mad joy of strength surged over him. A little way apart a struggling group was weaving in and out with darts of steel and quick flashes of rifles, and hoarse gruntings and cursings. He ran toward it, swinging his broken rifle round his head. "Give 'em heyell, boys," he shouted. "Kill the damn niggers."
 
From that day he was called Wild Fagan, and Fagan the Nigger-Killer, and as the campaign progressed, his renown passed beyond his regiment. "Heard about that wild nigger in the Fifty-fourth?" asked the Cavalry, borrowing a pinch of Durham and a pit of paper from the Mountain Battery. "Don't sabe fire his rifle. Just butts in and swats 'em with it, like he was wantin' to play gollf." The story grew till the Marines, returning from shore service, told the Fleet, half-seriously, of a wild regiment come straight from Africa, "what only knew how to fight with war-clubs." And jacky, ever ready to believe, swore softly in admiration, and spat over the rail, and dreamed of having a little go with that regiment, some night in Nagasaki, when every one had had about seven drinks all round.
 
Even the officers began to boast. "Oh, you mean our man Fagan," the Colonel would say to guests at mess. "Yes, he's a good man. Expensive—a rifle lasts him about a day when things are lively;—but efficient. Yes, highly efficient. The natives are beginning to dodge the regiment. Yes, I'll let you see him after dinner. Finest build of a man you ever laid eyes on. Like a cat, you know, like a cat and a grizzly rolled into one."
 
And Fagan through it all was unchanged, good-natured, childlike as ever. He was even a bit ashamed of his strength. "That little scrap down by the bridge?" he would say to a group of admirers. "Oh, that all wa'n't nothin'. That big Fillypeeno? Oh, yes, I hit him. Yes, I raickon I smashed him some," he would muse with his slow smile. "I broke my gun on him. Anybody got any tobacca? I nevah can keep no tobacca."
 
It was after the fighting was done and the regiment went into stations of companies in the villages that the change began to come. The men, keyed to exertion and excitement, found the idleness of barrack life first pleasant, then irksome. And they were at home in these sunny islands, far more at home than ever in the States. They read the freedom of the land in the burning sky, and the clicking palms, and the lazy air. More than anywhere else, they read it in the dark, admiring eyes of the brown, slim, soft-moving girls. The men began to be absent at check roll-call at Taps.
 
Then all the wisdom and tact of an officer was needed. Too great easiness meant loss of control, harshness meant desertions. For a time Lieutenant Sharpe did very well. He overlooked what he could, and was unangered in his firmness when he must be firm. But nature and fixed habit overcame him, and Fagan was naturally the chief sufferer, for the officer had grown into the belief that Fagan was the probable cause of every misdemeanor in the company. So it was a reprimand, and then another sharper, and then the summary court—where the Lieutenant was prosecutor and jury and judge—sentenced Fagan to the loss of a month's pay for attempting to run the guard at some unearthly hour of the night. Within a week he repeated the offence, and Lieutenant Sharpe, with the fear of God and the Regulations in his heart, and wondrous small understanding in his head, sentenced him to a "month and a month." A month of confinement will give any man much time for reflection, and the Lieutenant hoped it might prove salutary.
 
Fagan received his sentence with ominous lack of his former protestations, and went quietly to the guard-house. But being neither an accomplished thinker nor an expert in moral theory, he did not reflect. He merely sat there and brooded. "All I'm lookin' for is jus' a fayah show," he told himself, over and over again. "He use me right, an' I'll use him right. Ain't I the bes' fightin' man in the regiment, ain't the Kuhnel done said so, a whole plainty o' times? When they's fightin', I'll be there. But that little Lootenant—Lawszee, couldn' I smash him—all I want is jus' a straight deal."
 
Fagan emerged at the end of his month still a child, but a sullen child now, moping over a bitter sense of injustice. "I ain' nevah gwine to stay in theah anothah night," he told his friend the Sergeant. "All I want is a fayah deal, an' I'll use ev'rybody straight. But no one ain't gwine to keep me in theah again." The Sergeant, wise as most old soldiers, made no answer. If the Lieutenant and Wild Fagan were to fight it out, it was no affair of the Sergeant's.
 
But Fagan, over the drinks, repeated his ultimatum to other men, who waited joyously for the clash, and were surprised and disappointed when Fagan went quietly to the guard-house once again, placed there to await the sitting of a general court martial. The quietness was only because he was learning to plan. When the silence of midnight came, he stole over to an inner window, braced a shoulder and a knee, and the rusted bars yielded noiselessly. He crept up-stairs to his squad-room and took the rifle and the belt, heavy with two hundred rounds of ammunition, from the head of his bunk, and crept as silently down. He tried to steal by the guard at the gate, but the man turned and leveled his rifle, hardly six feet away.
 
"Halt! Who goes theah?" he challenged, with the mechanical lilt of the sentry.
 
"You min' you' business, Sam, an' I'll ten' to mine," Fagan growled.
 
But the man persisted, though with a tremor in his voice. "Yo' halt, Fagan. Ah've got to fin'—"
 
Fagan gripped his rifle by the muzzle, and stepped swiftly toward the leveled one. "You git out o' heah, Sam," he ordered. "Git, or I'll smash you."
 
The sentry dropped his rifle. "Ah ain' nevah troubled you all, Fagan," he whined. "Ah'm a frien' o' you all's. You lait me alone." He sank to his knees. "You lait me alone. Don' you touch me, don' you touch—" His voice rose to a shriek, but he was talking to empty air. Fagan had picked up the extra rifle and slipped away toward the town.
 
"Ah couldn' he'ep it, sah. He done come up out o' the dahk, with his eyes a buhnin', an' he sa-ays, 'Ah'll maash you, Sam.' Ah couldn' he'ep mase'ef. Ah've seen him maash these yere Fillypeenos." Thus the sentry to the Lieutenant next morning, with heartfelt earnestness. "Ah wouldn' cared if he was gwine to shoot, but he comes a grinnin', an' he sa-ays, 'Ah'll maash you, Sam.' That's what he sa-ays, an' he'd a done it," he explained later, to a group of sympathizing men. "Ah don' min' gettin' shot, but Ah suah don' wantah git maashed. So Ah dropped ma rifle. Ah've seen him maash these yere Fillypeenos. He ain' no man, he's a plumb bawn devil, tha's what he is," and Sam wiped the sweat drops from his throat with the back of his big, shaking hand.
 
Then ensued many tentative pushings at the bars, to prove that no two mere men could spring them back into position, and many side-long glances at Fagan's ownerless cot and the chest which stood beside it, closed and mysterious. When the men turned in, no one objected that Sam placed a lighted candle on it. "They don' come roun' wheah it's light," he explained vaguely to the room, and every one knew what "they" meant. Even the old Sergeant, coming through at roll-call, apparently did not see the forbidden light.
 
And now the United States Army lapsed into a state of hysteria which often amused and puzzled those who witnessed it. It became haunted by a big black man who mashed people instead of shooting them decently. There happened to be a recrudescence of fighting, and the Army imputed it to Fagan. That stupid, brooding, grown-up child became a tactician, a strategist, a second De Wet of guerilla warfare.
 
"I have the honor to report," wrote young Shavetail to the A.G.O.—through proper channels—"a sharp engagement wherein the enemy hindered the development of my flanking movement by—unusual brilliancy for native leaders—honor to suggest—deserter Fagan rumored to be in vicinity."
 
"Scouts report," wired Major Oakleaf, "two hours' ride southeast of camp, huge negro. Request description renegade Fagan."
 
"We're out gunnin' fer that big buck nigger answers to the name of Fagan," remarked Mountain Battery to Cavalry, borrowing back the "makings" and a match to boot. "He's seen up back here in the foot-hills last night."
 
"Wire through this mornin'," jeered Signal Corps, overhearing, "reportin' him up Cagayan way. An' yesterday he was down in Batangas. He sure must hike light."
 
"Well, he's a lively nigger, from all I hear," said Cavalry judicially. "Some one'll likely get hurt 'fore they get him."
 
"He'll maybe get hurt a little bit himself, just a shade, if this old girl falls on him," laughed Mountain Battery, patting the nose of the vicious little gun in the packsaddle. "Ho' still, you old mule-horse, you! Think I'll stand for you kickin' me?"
 
So the little armies marched and sweated, and the wires carried bulletins to every little post: "Inform troops and natives—renegade Fagan, deserter Fifty-fourth—very big black negro, age twenty-one, large bolo scar on breast—five hundred dollars, gold, alive or dead."
 
And all the while Fagan was living quietly with the girl who had been the chief cause of all his insubordination, in a little mountain village not fifty miles from the place where his ghost first rose and called for lighted candles.
 
The reports of his evil fame brought him no joy. "Why can't they let us alone," he complained to Patricia. "I never hurt them, and if they don't trouble us we won't trouble them. Eh, Patsí?" and he swept the slender girl up to his shoulder.
 
"Pooh," cried Patricia disdainfully, from her height. "What do we care for them! You will kill them all, won't you?" She pinched the great supporting arm with a sigh of satisfaction. "Hola, there's Enrique's cock fighting with Juan's. Let's go and watch them." And as they walked down the narrow grassy street, the people stepped aside with cheerful smiles, for all the world like the dusty pickaninnies on the levee when one of the heaven-born passes by.
 
For a long time Fagan and Patricia lived on in the village, till the man was becoming a myth. A dozen enterprising hunters had brought in his head, and the papers in Manila had ceased to give circumstantial accounts of his capture even when news was short. But at last an American prisoner came to the town, the only white man who saw Fagan alive after his desertion. By a strange chance he was an officer of the Fifty-fourth, and Fagan received him with sober joy.
 
"I'se right glad to see you, Lootenant," he said. "I raickoned they'd bring you up heah, when I hea'd you was done capchuhed. They kind brings mos' ev'ything up to me, these days."
 
The white man was not joyous, though undismayed. "What are you going to do with me, now you've got me?" he demanded.
 
"Don' you worry, Lootenant," Fagan answered. "I wouldn' huht you. No, sir, you nevah troubled me. You jus' set down an' have a smoke. I'se a gwine to send you down, jus' as soon as I can."
 
They sat and smoked in silence, the giant negro, the prisoner in his draggled uniform, the little brown guards with their naked bobs. At last Fagan said, "I raickon we could talk bettah if these yere guards was away. You git," he pointed to them. "Course you give you' wohd, Lootenant, you won't try to 'scape."
 
The officer nodded, and fell to watching the great, quiet, unshapen black face. It roused his curiosity for a certain non-offensive air of self-reliance which he had never seen in a black face before. "Fagan," he asked suddenly, "why did you do it?"
 
"Do what, Lootenant?"
 
"Desert, and lead the natives against us, and all that."
 
The negro clenched his great fist. "This yere fool talk makes me plumb riled," he said. "I ain' nevah fought the 'Mericans. I'se a 'Merican myse'f, ain't I? An' what would I want to go yampin' roun' the country for, anyway? I'se got all I want right heah, chickens, an' yams, an' a good dry house, an'—" He reached out his hand and grasped Patricia's little one, and they smiled at each other. "No, sir, I don' want no moah fightin'. I'se got a good home, an' I goes to sleep when I wants to, an' I gits up when I wants to, an' I has clean clo'es ev'y day. You tell the Kuhnel, Lootenant, you tell him Fagan nevah went to huht no 'Mericans, an' nevah will, less'n they goes to huht me first. You believe that, don' you, Lootenant?" And the officer gravely nodded "Yes."
 
"Bout that desertin', now. I'se thought a whole lot about that, an' I raickon I done it jus' because I had to have mo' room. I'se some big, I raickon—" he let his eyes travel slowly down his body and chuckled—"seems like I has to have a whole plainty o' room. Seems like they wahn't room fo' me an' Lootenant Sha'ap in one ahmy. No, sir. An' then, I dunno, Lootenant, maybe you nevah felt how a woman can make you 'shamed of youse'f? This Patricia lady, maybe she don' seem like much to you, but she's a heap to me—yes, sir,—an' she kep' sayin', 'What for you go calabozo, Fagan? Kill the little pig of a teniente,' she says. 'Kill ev'rybody. You'se big enough.' An' then she laughs at me. 'Is you 'fraid, big man?' she says. 'Lend me youah revolvah, then. I'se little, but I ain't afraid.' She jus' made me plumb scairt of myse'f, an' we come away, 'cause Patsí an' me needed more room 'n what Lootenant Sha'ap could give us. 'Pears like you couldn' understan' it, but that's the way it was, I raickon. I jus' had to desert or huht somebody bad."
 
He stopped, and the woman began to speak to him. The white man watched her, and a great light burst upon him. She was glorious, this slim, soft brown thing with the dusky hair and the straight, slender neck, and—"I'se little, but I ain't afraid." Ages of civilization dropped from the man as he gazed, and with a graceless pity he compared the pale fettered women he had known with this free, wild, perfect thing whose feeling was her life. She was talking with her tongue and eyes and hands, and Fagan answered a few words and laughed, and she laughed, too, a sound as natural and sweet as the ripple of a stream, and then her great eyes lighted with earnestness as she went on. The Lieutenant felt a pang of something almost jealousy. He could never bring fire to those eyes, he was not a man to her, only a thing, not to be compared with that black giant.
 
Fagan turned to him with an amused chuckle. "She's full o' ginger," he said. "I raickon it's lucky I was heah when you come. She's jus' been askin' when I was goin' to kill you. 'You must,' she says, 'or else he'll lead soldiers up heah.' That's all right, Lootenant," he said, as the officer moved uneasily. "That's you' duty, an' it's all right, only she don' understand that. 'Le's kill him now,' she says. 'You keep a talkin' with him, an' I'll put the knife into him from behin'. It won' be no trouble at all.' Lawszee," he chuckled admiringly, "I raickon she'd a done it, too. She's got moah ginger!"
 
The Lieutenant smiled with him, but he soon rose, unobtrusively, and seated himself with his back to the solid corner-post of the house. Patricia watched the manoeuvre with unfathomable eyes, and the men burst into laughter; then she hung her head like a child caught in some mischief. The gesture was adorable, and suddenly sadness stifled the white man's laughter.
 
"I'm sorry about reporting your presence here," he said. "I understand, I think, and I believe you don't want to make trouble, but—"
 
"Don' you worry about that," Fagan broke in. "I'se a gwine to send you down to the ra'alroad this afternoon. An' now Patsí's goin' to get you some dinner."
 
"Fagan," said the Lieutenant, yet more earnestly, while his guard waited for him to mount, "I'm right sorry about this. But—why don't you come down with me now and surrender?" he asked impulsively. "That will help, and I can explain some things to the court, and you'll only get six months or so, for desertion. Only six months, and then—you can come back to Patricia," he ended almost enviously.
 
The negro seemed to swell before the white man's astonished eyes. "I'se sorry, too. It's been mighty pleasant, livin' heah," he said simply. "An' thank you fer askin' me to come down. I know you means it straight. But you can't see it like I do. Down theah I'se a niggah soldier. Up heah I'se— Nobody ain't got any right to try me," he burst out. "I nevah troubled them. You tell the Kuhnel that, I want he should understan'. I don' want to huht no one, but I'se nevah gwine into no gahd-house again. Good-by, Lootenant, an' luck. I don' raickon we all'll evah meet up again."
 
 Fagan and Patricia. 
Fagan and Patricia.
So Fagan and Patricia must needs leave the snug little house at the end of the sleepy, grass-grown street, and go out on the High Trail, the unknown of the people of the plains, a broad highway to things with hoofs and claws and wings, and to men little less wild than they, the men of the hills. At times the brown thread of the Trail was twined amid the giant roots of trees, and they wandered in a cool twilight, alone with the long creepers and the ferns and the bright birds which played about some opening in the matted roof, far above their heads, where the sun dropped through for a brief hour. Sometimes it clung to the massive walls of a ca?on, where a river boiled so far below that the sound of its torment came to their ears like the babble of a brook. Sometimes it shot upward to the realm of the clouds, and from the bare, grassy heights they peered out through shifting mist wreaths over all the cities and fields of the plains to the blue hint of the distant sea.
 
Fagan and Patricia followed the Trail steadily but leisurely, day after day. There was no call for haste, no white pursuer knew that road. So they laughed and played, and lay for hours beside some cool spring, basking in the warm sunshine and the thin, sharp air, and camped at night in little valleys under a pall of cloud. Once Fagan shot a deer, and they delayed for days, drying the meat over pungent wood-smoke. But as their muscles hardened to the Trail, they insensibly made greater progress, in spite of their dallying.
 
Two weeks brought them to the land of the Unknown, had they but known it. The mountains were higher and wilder, the cloud-caps more frequent. Often the forest on some huge hill, towering black above the Trail, was thin and pointed at the top, as if it had been torn, and there, unseen of them, was a village perched high on the trunks of trees, whence keen-eyed men watched their progress. But they were children of the plains and could not know, so they walked undismayed. And the keen-eyed men walked with them, unseen, frisking along above them over ground where others would have crept—short, huge-limbed men, whose stiff black hair flowed over their shoulders, and was tied out of their eyes with fillets, men who squatted naked in the mists of evening and did not shiver, men who brought their sweethearts hideous dowries of human heads. They hung about the Trail, watching these strange creatures who walked openly and undismayed in the land of Fear. Often, when the camp-fire was lighted, they stole up with their muscles twitching like a cat's before she springs, and then halted as a great voice rang over the forest—"I'se been wo'okin' on the ra'alroad"—and they clawed their way up the slopes to the long-legged villages, and took counsel together in the queer fire-shadows.
 
One evening as they camped, Patricia missed a little bundle of venison and strolled back along the Trail to look for it. Fagan kindled the fire and then strolled back, too. "Hoy, Patsí," he called. The forest was silent. He turned a bend in the Trail, and there—Fagan gazed at it stupidly. Then the blind impulse of wrath swept over him again. But there was naught to strike. The long shadows of the trees lay across the Trail, the creepers swayed lazily in the evening breeze; far up, a crow called petulantly to her belated mate. Fagan swung his arm helplessly at the forest.
 
"Come out," he moaned, "come out wheah I can see you. Come out, you cowards, you sneakin' dogs that kills women from behind. I'se not afraid of you. Oh, I'll mash you! Come!" With a soft chug, a lance stuck quivering in the tree beside him. Otherwise all was silent; even the crow had ceased to scold. He looked down. A darker shadow was stealing among the lengthening ones on the Trail. The spirit of the forest gripped Fagan with an icy hand, the spirit of Dread. He ran blindly to the fire, seized his rifle, and took up the Trail alone.
 
For three days and nights he hurried on. The empty pain of his stomach, the dizzying, numbing lack of sleep, could not hold him against the dread of his unseen escort. It gave little sign, simply the rustling of a fern now and then, the swaying of one creeper when others were still, but he felt its presence and staggered on. On the evening of the third day, he stepped suddenly from the forest into a little theatre among the hills. A clear brook bubbled over golden gravel; the turf beneath a great solitary tree was thick and soft. Wild cocks in the wood were crowing their families to roost.
 
Everything was quiet and peaceful, and Fagan, as he gazed, became peaceful and quiet, too. He flung himself on the soft turf, and drank his fill from the little brook. As always, when he sought to rest, the forest became vague with life. A covey of jungle-fowl, flushed by a sudden fright, whirred across the opening. A stone rolled somewhere close at hand, dislodged by a purposely careless foot. But this time Fagan merely grinned, and shook off his clinging cartridge-belt. "You can' bluff me no moah," he said to the forest, a trick he had learned of late. A fern swayed not a dozen yards away, and he clicked a cartridge into his Krag and fired. "You git out," he chuckled. "I'se a gittin' tired of you' company."
 
When he was rested a little, he kindled a fire and toasted a bit of venison. Then he lay back lazily and twisted his last bit of tobacco into a cigarette. Between puffs he bellowed his evening song, and the rude melody took on the sweetness of a ballad. "Don' you heah the bugle callin'?" Fagan sang, and tossed the butt of the cigarette into the fire. It was quite dark now in the hollow, and he sat in a little circle of dancing light. He looked at the wall of blackness with quiet, unfrightened eyes that presently began to close with the pressure of a mighty drowsiness.
 
"I'se po'owful sleepy now," he announced at length, "an' I'se a gwine to bed. I was hopin' to set up an' meet some of you all, but I can't do it. When you all wants me, you all can wake me up." The fire flickered, and he pillowed his head on his arm, and watched the dance of the shadows grow shorter. "Lawszee," he murmured, drowsily, as the great numbness of sleep overcame him, "I raickon Patricia'd think I was scairt again. She'd a sat up an' waited foh them, but I can't. That little girl did have the po'owf'les' lot o' ginger in her." He threw his great arm protectingly over the empty ground beside him. "Good night, Patsí," he murmured.
 
 
 
In that well-remembered town among the paddies, a squat and naked man, huge-muscled, came out of the door of the quarters. In his hand he carried a broad-bladed spear. A head-axe, bright as only speckless steel can be in sunlight, flashed in his girdle. And at his back a bag, plumply round, bobbed heavily, and as it bobbed it gave out a dull jingle, as of coined metal.
 
"Got his money, all right," said one of the group that watched him.
 
The savage halted, and grinned widely at each in turn. "Me got," he announced proudly. "Mucho dinero. Mucho mucho dinero. Me got." He could scarcely contain his joy.
 
One of the watchers growled. "I'm not in favior," said he, "of payin' gu-gus for killin' white men, no matter whether they're white or black. It's a catchin' habit." It was the judicial soldier. He swung his lean bulk toward the grinning little man. "Now you've got it," he commanded, "git!"
 
The savage, half-comprehending, turned and passed down the path they opened for him, and down the sun-beaten, dusty street, where the silent people fell away before him as if he carried pestilence. And so they saw the last of him, making for those distant, cloud-hung hills of his, moving clumsily but swiftly across the paddies at his shuffling trot, while the price of a man's rebellion bobbed, and jingled dully at his back.