had fancied the Red One to be some colossal statue, like Memnon,
rendered vocal under certain temperature conditions of sunlight.
But when, after a war raid, a batch of prisoners was brought in and
the sacrifice made at night, in the midst of rain, when the sun
could play no part, the Red One had been more vocal than usual,
Bassett discarded that hypothesis.

In company with Balatta, sometimes with men and parties of women,
the freedom of the jungle was his for three quadrants of the
compass. But the fourth quadrant, which contained the Red One's
abiding place, was taboo. He made more thorough love to Balatta--
also saw to it that she scrubbed herself more frequently. Eternal
female she was, capable of any treason for the sake of love. And,
though the sight of her was provocative of nausea and the contact
of her provocative of despair, although he could not escape her
awfulness in his dream-haunted nightmares of her, he nevertheless
was aware of the cosmic verity of sex that animated her and that
made her own life of less value than the happiness of her lover
with whom she hoped to mate. Juliet or Balatta? Where was the
intrinsic difference? The soft and tender product of ultra-
civilization, or her bestial prototype of a hundred thousand years
before her?--there was no difference.

Bassett was a scientist first, a humanist afterward. In the
jungle-heart of Guadalcanal he put the affair to the test, as in
the laboratory he would have put to the test any chemical reaction.
He increased his feigned ardour for the bushwoman, at the same time
increasing the imperiousness of his will of desire over her to be
led to look upon the Red One face to face. It was the old story,
he recognized, that the woman must pay, and it occurred when the