annoyed, paused to regain his breath and his temper. Below him, in
the ravine, the shallow waters of the ford called to him, suggesting a
pleasant compromise. He turned his eyes downward and saw hanging over
the water what appeared to be a white bird upon the lower limb of a
dead tree. He knew it to be an orchid, an especially rare orchid, and he
knew, also, that the orchid was the favorite flower of Miss Armitage.
In a moment he was on his feet, and with the reins over his arm, was
slipping down the bank, dragging El Capitan behind him. He ripped from
the dead tree the bark to which the orchid was clinging, and with wet
moss and grass packed it in his leather camera case. The camera he
abandoned on the path. He always could buy another camera; he could not
again carry a white orchid, plucked in the heart of the tropics on the
night peace was declared, to the girl he left behind him. Followed by El
Capitan, nosing and snuffing gratefully at the cool waters, he waded the
ford, and with his camera case swinging from his shoulder, galloped up
the opposite bank and back into the trail.

A minute later, the bridge, unable to recover from the death blow struck
by El Capitan, went whirling into the ravine and was broken upon the
rocks below. Hearing the crash behind him, Chesterton guessed that in
the jungle a tree had fallen.

They had started at six in the afternoon and had covered twenty of the
forty miles that lay between Adhuntas and Mayaguez, when, just at the
outskirts of the tiny village of Caguan, El Capitan stumbled, and when
he arose painfully, he again fell forward.

Caguan was a little church, a little vine-covered inn, a dozen one-story
adobe houses shining in the moonlight like whitewashed sepulchres. They
faced a grass-grown plaza, in the centre of which stood a great wooden