Hatteras, however, continued.  He appeared to have forgotten Walker’s presence.  He told the story to himself, for his own amusement, as a child will, and here and there he laughed and the mere sound of his laughter was inhuman.  He only came to a stop when he saw Walker hold out to him a cocked and loaded revolver.

“Well?” he asked.  “Well?”

Walker still offered him the revolver.

“There are cases, I think, which neither God’s law nor man’s law seems to have provided for.  There’s your wife you see to be considered.  If you don’t take it I shall shoot you myself now, here, and mark you I shall shoot you for the sake of a boy I loved at school in the old country.”

Hatteras took the revolver in silence, laid it on the table, fingered it for a little.

“My wife must never know,” he said.

“There’s the pistol.  Outside’s the swamp.  The swamp will tell no tales, nor shall I. Your wife need never know.”

Hatteras picked up the pistol and stood up.

“Good-bye, Jim,” he said, and half pushed out his hand.  Walker shook his head, and Hatteras went out on to the verandah and down the steps.

Walker heard him climb over the fence; and then followed as far as the verandah.  In the still night the rustle and swish of the undergrowth came quite clearly to his ears.  The sound ceased, and a few minutes afterwards the muffled crack of a pistol shot broke the silence like the tap of a hammer.  The swamp, as Walker prophesied, told no tales.  Mrs. Hatteras gave the one explanation of her husband’s disappearance that she knew and returned brokenhearted to England.  There was some loud talk about the self-sacrificing energy, which makes the English a dominant race, and there you might think is the end of the story.

But some years later Walker went trudging up the Ogowe river in Congo Francais.  He travelled as far as Woermann’s factory in Njole Island and, having transacted his business there, pushed up stream in the hope of opening the upper reaches for trade purposes.  He travelled for a hundred and fifty miles in a little stern-wheel steamer.  At that point he stretched an awning over a whale-boat, embarked himself, his banjo and eight blacks from the steamer, and rowed for another fifty miles.  There he ran the boat’s nose into a clay cliff close to a Fan village and went ashore to negotiate with the chief.

There was a slip of forest between the village and the river bank, and while Walker was still dodging the palm creepers which tapestried it he heard a noise of lamentation.  The noise came from the village and was general enough to assure him that a chief was dead.  It rose in a chorus of discordant howls, low in note and long-drawn out—­wordless, something like the howls of an animal in pain and yet human by reason of their infinite melancholy.