The hunt went on.  Once, coming to the edge of the grove near the bungalow, he saw the house-boys and the cook, clustered on the back veranda and peering curiously among the trees, talking and laughing with one another in their queer falsetto voices.  Another time he came upon a working-gang busy at hoeing weeds.  They scarcely noticed him when he came up, though they knew thoroughly well what was going on.  It was no affair of theirs that the enigmatical white men should be out trying to kill each other, and whatever interest in the proceedings might be theirs they were careful to conceal it from Sheldon.  He ordered them to continue hoeing weeds in a distant and out-of-the-way corner, and went on with the pursuit of Tudor.

Tiring of the endless circling, Sheldon tried once more to advance directly on his foe, but the latter was too crafty, taking advantage of his boldness to fire a couple of shots at him, and slipping away on some changed and continually changing course.  For an hour they dodged and turned and twisted back and forth and around, and hunted each other among the orderly palms.  They caught fleeting glimpses of each other and chanced flying shots which were without result.  On a grassy shelter behind a tree, Sheldon came upon where Tudor had rested and smoked a cigarette.  The pressed grass showed where he had sat.  To one side lay the cigarette stump and the charred match which had lighted it.  In front lay a scattering of bright metallic fragments.  Sheldon recognized their significance.  Tudor was notching his steel-jacketed bullets, or cutting them blunt, so that they would spread on striking—­in short, he was making them into the vicious dum-dum prohibited in modern warfare.  Sheldon knew now what would happen to him if a bullet struck his body.  It would leave a tiny hole where it entered, but the hole where it emerged would be the size of a saucer.

He decided to give up the pursuit, and lay down in the grass, protected right and left by the row of palms, with on either hand the long avenue extending.  This he could watch.  Tudor would have to come to him or else there would be no termination of the affair.  He wiped the sweat from his face and tied the handkerchief around his neck to keep off the stinging gnats that lurked in the grass.  Never had he felt so great a disgust for the thing called “adventure.”  Joan had been bad enough, with her Baden-Powell and long-barrelled Colt’s; but here was this newcomer also looking for adventure, and finding it in no other way than by lugging a peace-loving planter into an absurd and preposterous bush-whacking duel.  If ever adventure was well damned, it was by Sheldon, sweating in the windless grass and fighting gnats, the while he kept close watch up and down the avenue.