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CHAPTER XVII. HOME AGAIN

BILLY BYRNE continued to fire intermittently for half an hour after the two men

had left him. Then he fired several shots in quick succession, and dragging

himself to his hands and knees crawled laboriously and painfully back into the

jungle in search of a hiding place where he might die in peace.

He had progressed some hundred yards when he felt the earth give way beneath

him. He clutched frantically about for support, but there was none, and with a

sickening lunge he plunged downward into Stygian darkness.

His fall was a short one, and he brought up with a painful thud at the bottom of a

deer pit--a covered trap which the natives dig to catch their fleet-footed prey.

The pain of his wounds after the fall was excruciating. His head whirled dizzily.

He knew that he was dying, and then all went black.

When consciousness returned to the mucker it was daylight. The sky above

shone through the ragged hole that his falling body had broken in the pit's

covering the night before.

Gee!" muttered the mucker; "and I thought that I was dead!"

His wounds had ceased to bleed, but he was very weak and stiff and sore.

I guess I'm too tough to croak!" he thought.

He wondered if the two men would reach Barbara in safety. He hoped so. Mallory

loved her, and he was sure that Barbara had loved Mallory. He wanted her to be

happy. No thought of jealousy entered his mind. Mallory was her kind. Mallory

"belonged." He didn't. He was a mucker. How would he have looked training with

her bunch. She would have been ashamed of him, and he couldn't have stood

that. No, it was better as it had turned out. He'd squared himself for the beast

he'd been to her, and he'd squared himself with Mallory, too. At least they'd have

only decent thoughts of him, dead; but alive, that would be an entirely different

thing. He would be in the way. He would be a constant embarrassment to them

all, for they would feel that they'd have to be nice to him in return for what he

had done for them. The thought made the mucker sick.

"I'd rather croak," he murmured.

But he didn't "croak"--instead, he waxed stronger, and toward evening the pangs

of hunger and thirst drove him to consider means for escaping from his hiding

place, and searching for food and water.

132

The Mucker