with a revolver but no rifle—­and a couple of the camaradas.  We soon passed the dead body of poor Paishon.  He lay in a huddle, in a pool of his own blood, where he had fallen, shot through the heart.  I feared that Julio had run amuck, and intended merely to take more lives before he died, and that he would begin with Pedrinho, who was alone and unarmed in the camp we had left.  Accordingly I pushed on, followed by my companions, looking sharply right and left; but when we came to the camp the doctor quietly walked by me, remarking, “My eyes are better than yours, colonel; if he is in sight I’ll point him out to you, as you have the rifle.”  However, he was not there, and the others soon joined us with the welcome news that they had found the carbine.

The murderer had stood to one side of the path and killed his victim, when a dozen paces off, with deliberate and malignant purpose.  Then evidently his murderous hatred had at once given way to his innate cowardice; and, perhaps hearing some one coming along the path, he fled in panic terror into the wilderness.  A tree had knocked the carbine from his hand.  His footsteps showed that after going some rods he had started to return, doubtless for the carbine, but had fled again, probably because the body had then been discovered.  It was questionable whether or not he would live to reach the Indian villages, which were probably his goal.  He was not a man to feel remorse—­never a common feeling; but surely that murderer was in a living hell, as, with fever and famine leering at him from the shadows, he made his way through the empty desolation of the wilderness.  Franca, the cook, quoted out of the melancholy proverbial philosophy of the people the proverb:  “No man knows the heart of any one”; and then expressed with deep conviction a weird ghostly belief I had never encountered before:  “Paishon is following Julio now, and will follow him until he dies; Paishon fell forward on his hands and knees, and when a murdered man falls like that his ghost will follow the slayer as long as the slayer lives.”

We did not attempt to pursue the murderer.  We could not legally put him to death, although he was a soldier who in cold blood had just deliberately killed a fellow soldier.  If we had been near civilization we would have done our best to bring him in and turn him over to justice.  But we were in the wilderness, and how many weeks’ journey were ahead of us we could not tell.  Our food was running low, sickness was beginning to appear among the men, and both their courage and their strength were gradually ebbing.  Our first duty was to save the lives and the health of the men of the expedition who had honestly been performing, and had still to perform, so much perilous labor.  If we brought the murderer in he would have to be guarded night and day on an expedition where there were always loaded firearms about, and where there would continually be opportunity and temptation for him to make an effort to seize food and a weapon