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filled the patio, and he smiled humbly and sketched small gestures for silence, and there was no respect anywhere left for him in his home, in the town, in the whole abandoned star.

Chapter Three

    CAPTAIN FELLOWS sang loudly to himself, while the little motor chugged in the bows of the canoe. His big sunburned face was like the map of a mountain region-patches of varying brown with two small lakes that were his eyes. He composed his songs as he went, and his voice was quite tuneless. "Going home, going home, the food will be good for m-e-e. I don't like the food in the bloody citee." He turned out of the main stream into a tributary: a few alligators lay on the sandy margin. "I don't like your snouts, O trouts. I don't like your snouts, O trouts." He was a happy man.

The banana plantations came down on either bank: his voice boomed under the hard sun: that and the churr of the motor were the only sounds anywhere-he was completely alone. He was borne up on a big tide of boyish joy-doing a mans job, the heart of the wild: he felt no responsibility for anyone. In only one other country had he felt more happy, and that was in war-time France, in the ravaged landscape of trenches. The tributary corkscrewed farther into the marshy overgrown state, and a buzzard lay spread out in the sky. Captain Fellows opened a tin box and ate a sandwich-food never tasted so good as out of doors. A monkey made a sudden chatter at him as he went by, and Captain Fellows felt happily at one with nature-a wide shallow kinship with all the world moved with the bloodstream through the veins: he was at home anywhere. The artful little devil, he thought, the artful little devil. He began to sing again-somebody else's words a little jumbled in his friendly unretentive memory. "Give to me the life I love, bread I dip in the river, under the wide and starry sky, the hunter's home from the sea." The plantations petered out, and far behind the mountains came into view, heavy black lines drawn low-down across the sky. A few bungalows rose out of the mud. He was home. A very slight cloud marred his happiness.

He thought: After all, a man likes to be welcomed.

He walked up to his bungalow: it was distinguished from the others which lay along the bank by a tiled roof, a flagpost without a flag, a plate on the door with the title, "Central American Banana Company." Two hammocks were strung up on the veranda, but there was nobody about. Captain Fellows knew where to find his wife-it was not she he had expected. He burst boisterously through a door and shouted: 'Daddy's home." A scared thin face peeked at him through a mosquito net; his boots ground peace into the floor; Mrs. Fellows flinched away into the white muslin tent. He said: "Pleased to see me, Trix?" and she drew rapidly on her face the outline of her frightened welcome. It was like a trick you do with a blackboard. Draw a dog in one line without lifting the chalk-and the answer, of course, is a sausage.

"I'm glad to be home," Captain Fellows said, and he believed it. It was his one firm conviction-that he really felt the correct emotions of love and joy and grief and hate. He had always been a good man at zero hour.

"All well at the office?"

"Fine," Fellows said, "fine."

"I had a bit of fever yesterday."

"Ah, you need looking after. You'll be all right now," he said vaguely, "that I'm home." He shied merrily away from the subject of fever-clapping his hands, a big laugh, while she trembled in her tent. "Where's Coral?"

"She's with the policeman," Mrs. Fellows said.

"I hoped she'd meet me," he said, roaming aimlessly about the little, inferior room, full of boot-trees, while his brain caught up with her. "Policeman? What policeman?"

"He came last night and Coral let him sleep on the veranda. He's looking for somebody, she says."

"What an extraordinary thing! Here?"

"He's not an ordinary policeman. He's an officer. He left his men in the village-Coral says."

"I do think you ought to be up," he