know that I thought of her."

"Oh, very well," Trent declared, thrusting the letter into his
pocket. "It's a bit outside our agreement, you know, but I'll see
to it anyhow. Anything else?"

Monty fell back speechless. There was a sudden change in his face.
Trent, who had seen men die before, let go his hand and turned away
without any visible emotion. Then he drew himself straight, and
set his teeth hard together.

"I'm going to get out of this," he said to himself slowly and with
fierce emphasis. "I'm not for dying and I won't die!"

He stumbled on a few steps, a little black snake crept out of its
bed of mud, and looked at him with yellow eyes protruding from its
upraised head. He kicked it savagely away - a crumpled, shapeless
mass. It was a piece of brutality typical of the man. Ahead he
fancied that the air was clearer - the fetid mists less choking - in
the deep night-silence a few hours back he had fancied that he had
heard the faint thunder of the sea. If this were indeed so, it
would be but a short distance now to the end of his journey. With
dull, glazed eyes and clenched hands, he reeled on. A sort of
stupor had laid hold of him, but through it all his brain was
working, and he kept steadily to a fixed course. Was it the sea
in his ears, he wondered, that long, monotonous rolling of sound,
and there were lights before his eyes - the lights of Buckomari, or
the lights of death!

They found him an hour or two later unconscious, but alive, on the