tongue spoke as much. Still alive, she gazed at him with eyes of
terror. Past help, he decided, as he noted the swellings of her
legs which advertised that the joints had been crushed and the
great bones broken. He resolved to shoot her, and there the vision
terminated. He could not remember whether he had or not, any more
than could he remember how he chanced to be in that village, or how
he succeeded in getting away from it.

Many pictures, unrelated, came and went in Bassett's mind as he
reviewed that period of his terrible wanderings. He remembered
invading another village of a dozen houses and driving all before
him with his shot-gun save, for one old man, too feeble to flee,
who spat at him and whined and snarled as he dug open a ground-oven
and from amid the hot stones dragged forth a roasted pig that
steamed its essence deliciously through its green-leaf wrappings.
It was at this place that a wantonness of savagery had seized upon
him. Having feasted, ready to depart with a hind-quarter of the
pig in his hand, he deliberately fired the grass thatch of a house
with his burning glass.

But seared deepest of all in Bassett's brain, was the dank and
noisome jungle. It actually stank with evil, and it was always
twilight. Rarely did a shaft of sunlight penetrate its matted roof
a hundred feet overhead. And beneath that roof was an aerial ooze
of vegetation, a monstrous, parasitic dripping of decadent life-
forms that rooted in death and lived on death. And through all
this he drifted, ever pursued by the flitting shadows of the
anthropophagi, themselves ghosts of evil that dared not face him in
battle but that knew that, soon or late, they would feed on him.
Bassett remembered that at the time, in lucid moments, he had