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His voice had become so low and weak that the girl could scarce distinguish his

words. He gasped once or twice, and then tried to speak again. Barbara leaned

closer, her ear almost against his lips.

"Good-bye--dear." The words were almost inaudible, and then the body stiffened

with a little convulsive tremor, and Henri Theriere, Count de Cadenet, passed

over into the keeping of his noble ancestors.

He's gone!" whispered the girl, dry-eyed but suffering. She had not loved this

man, she realized, but she had learned to think of him as her one true friend in

their little world of scoundrels and murderers. She had cared for him very much--

it was entirely possible that some day she might have come to return his evident

affection for her. She knew nothing of the seamy side of his hard life. She had

guessed nothing of the scoundrelly duplicity that had marked his first advances

toward her. She thought of him only as a true, brave gentleman, and in that she

was right, for whatever Henri Theriere might have been in the past the last few

days of his life had revealed him in the true colors that birth and nature had

intended him to wear through a brilliant career. In his death he had atoned for

many sins.

And in those last few days he had transferred, all unknown to himself or the

other man, a measure of the gentility and chivalry that were his birthright, for,

unrealizing, Billy Byrne was patterning himself after the man he had hated and

had come to love.

After the girl's announcement the mucker had continued to sit with bowed head

staring at the ground. Afternoon had deepened into evening, and now the brief

twilight of the tropics was upon them--in a few moments it would be dark.

Presently Byrne looked up. His eyes wandered about the tiny clearing. Suddenly

he staggered to his feet. Barbara Harding sprang up, startled by the evident

alarm in the man's attitude.

What is it?" she whispered. "What is the matter?"

De Chink!" he cried. "Where is de Chink?"

And, sure enough, Oda Iseka had disappeared!

The youthful daimio had taken advantage of the preoccupation of his captors

during the last moments of Theriere to gnaw in two the grass rope which bound

him to the mucker, and with hands still fast bound behind him had slunk into

the jungle path that led toward his village.

105

The Mucker