“Remember that I am not a shadow but a living woman still, Captain Jorgenson.  I can live and I can die.  Send me over to share their fate.”

“Sure you would like?” asked the roused Jorgenson in a voice that had an unexpected living quality, a faint vibration which no man had known in it for years.  “There may be death in it,” he mumbled, relapsing into indifference.

“Who cares?” she said, recklessly.  “All I want is to ask Tom a question and hear his answer.  That’s what I would like.  That’s what I must have.”

II

Along the hot and gloomy forest path, neglected, overgrown and strangled in the fierce life of the jungle, there came a faint rustle of leaves.  Jaffir, the servant of princes, the messenger of great men, walked, stooping, with a broad chopper in his hand.  He was naked from the waist upward, his shoulders and arms were scratched and bleeding.  A multitude of biting insects made a cloud about his head.  He had lost his costly and ancient head-kerchief, and when in a slightly wider space he stopped in a listening attitude anybody would have taken him for a fugitive.

He waved his arms about, slapping his shoulders, the sides of his head, his heaving flanks; then, motionless, listened again for a while.  A sound of firing, not so much made faint by distance as muffled by the masses of foliage, reached his ears, dropping shots which he could have counted if he had cared to.  “There is fighting in the forest already,” he thought.  Then putting his head low in the tunnel of vegetation he dashed forward out of the horrible cloud of flies, which he actually managed for an instant to leave behind him.  But it was not from the cruelty of insects that he was flying, for no man could hope to drop that escort, and Jaffir in his life of a faithful messenger had been accustomed, if such an extravagant phrase may be used, to be eaten alive.  Bent nearly double he glided and dodged between the trees, through the undergrowth, his brown body streaming with sweat, his firm limbs gleaming like limbs of imperishable bronze through the mass of green leaves that are forever born and forever dying.  For all his desperate haste he was no longer a fugitive; he was simply a man in a tremendous hurry.  His flight, which had begun with a bound and a rush and a general display of great presence of mind, was a simple issue from a critical situation.  Issues from critical situations are generally simple if one is quick enough to think of them in time.  He became aware very soon that the attempt to pursue him had been given up, but he had taken the forest path and had kept up his pace because he had left his Rajah and the lady Immada beset by enemies on the edge of the forest, as good as captives to a party of Tengga’s men.