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"You'll never put that over," Macray observed.

"With your help we will," Rolls answered, with a sullen eye askance on him.

"Well, no doubt I'm a host in myself," Macray chuckled, ever jocular, in spite of pain.

Now Cobby irritably loosed his belt with its sheaf-knife and six-shooter holster, saying: "But are you aware that the administration of chloroform occasionally ends fatally, and that we have no right——"

"Oh, now for a London sermon!" Rolls muttered intolerantly—tempers here not being at their best! for God caused a mist to rise up out of the ground, a steam of miasmas and malarias, good for snakes and the great venom-insects that came sailing in gay dress out of the tangle of undergrowth to glare at the flame and dance devil-dances to it, but bad for man.

"May I not express myself?" Cobby asked, glancing aside at Rolls, who sat by him, his back propped upon the same mass of banyan-trunk that had dropped there a century gone, to gather its scab of mosses and rot with all the rot of the tropic forest, within which, side by side, vied riot of corruption and riot of life, and the tribes of life thrived on the festering of the unburied dead.