Major Fayne suddenly grasped him by the shoulders, spinning him about, and dragging him forward, so that the dusky face was but inches removed from his own. He glared into the man’s eyes.

“Are you lying to me?” he demanded, “are you lying?”

“I swear it is the truth: why should I lie to you, Sahib?”

“You want them——”

Major Fayne broke off abruptly and thrust the man away from him. A different expression had crept into his face, an expression in which there was something furtive. He spun around upon[70] his heel and stepped to the tent where Moreen was. Raising the flap slightly:

[70]

“Good-night,” he called, and turned away.

Ramsa Lal had gone back to the fireside; and Fayne, following a moment of hesitancy, strode with his swaggering military gait to the tent erected in the furthermost corner of the clearing. He had stooped to enter, when he hesitated, remaining there bent forward—and listening.

From the opposite side of the distant fire, Ramsa Lal, though few would have suspected the fact, was watching. Evidently enough, the leader of the little company was obsessed with his delusion that some one or something clambered up the steep path beneath. Suddenly shrugging his shoulders, he stooped yet lower, and dived into the tent.

One of the natives threw fresh fuel upon the fire, and a stream of sparks sped up through the clear air in a widening trail ever growing fainter.

There was a crackling, a murmur of voices, and then a new silence. This in turn was broken by the distant howling of dogs, and in the near stillness one might have heard the faint shrieking of the bats, who now were embarked upon their nocturnal voyagings.

[71]

[71]

A shrill, wild scream burst suddenly from the heart of the trees in the east, rose eerily upon the night, and died away. But the group about the fire moved not at all, for this dreadful screaming but marked an animal tragedy of the Burma forests. So furred things howled and screamed and moaned in the woodlands, feathered things piped and hooted around and above, and the bats, uncanny creatures of the darkness, who seem to have kinship neither with fur nor feather, chirped faintly overhead.

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