had been inflicted on him for his crimes.  But such delusions are short-lived.  He slewed himself round after this tail in his efforts to see it, and squinting over his shoulder he did see it; and a warm liquid which he now felt stealing down his legs and turning cold as it went, opened his eyes still farther.  It was a red spear sticking in his person—­sticking tight.  Jacky, who had never got so near him as he fancied, saw him about to get into a tent, and, unable to tomahawk him, did the best he could—­flung a light javelin with such force and address that it pierced his coat and trousers and buried half its head in his flesh.

This spear-head, made of jagged fishbones, had to be cut out by the simple and agreeable process of making all round it a hole larger than itself.  The operation served to occupy Crawley for the remaining part of the night, and exercised his vocal powers.  This was the first time he had smarted in his penetrable part—­the skin—­and it made him very spiteful.  Away went his compunction, and at peep of day he shambled out very stiff, no longer dreading, but longing to hear which of his enemies it was he had seen wrapped in flame, shrieking, and annihilated like the snuff of a candle.  He came to the scene of action just as the sun rose.

But others were there before him.  A knot of men stood round a black patch of scorched soil, round which were scattered little fragments of canvas burned to tinder, talking over a most mysterious affair of the night past.

It came out that the patrol, some of whom were present, had been ordered by Captain Robinson not to go their rounds as usual, but to watch in a tent near his own, since he expected an attack.  Accustomed to keep awake on the move, but not in a recumbent posture, they had slept the sleep of infancy, till suddenly awakened by the sound of a pistol.  Then they had run out, and had found the captain’s tent in ashes, and a man lying near it sore hacked and insensible, but still breathing.  They had taken him to their tent, but he had never spoken, and the affair was incomprehensible.  While each was giving some wild opinion or another, a faint voice issued from the bowels of the earth, invoking aid.

Several ran to the spot, and at the bottom of an old claim full thirty feet deep they discovered on looking intently down the face of a man rising out of the clayey water.  They lowered ropes and hauled him up.

“How did you come there, mate?”

“He had come into the camp in the dark, and, not knowing the ground, and having (to tell the truth) had a drop, he had fallen into the claim.”

He was asked with an air of suspicion how long ago this had happened.

“More than an hour,” replied the wily one.

Crawley looked at him, and being, unlike the others, acquainted with the man’s features, saw, spite of the clay-cake he was enveloped in, that his whiskers were frizzled to nothing and his fiendish eyebrows gone.  Then a sickening suspicion crept over him; he communicated it by a look to mephistopheles.