314 Through the BraziHan Wilderness 



he fled in panic terror into the wilderness. A tree had 

 knocked the carbine from his hand. His footsteps 

 showed that after going some rods he had started to 

 return, doubtless for the carbine, but had fled again, 

 probably because the body had then been discovered. It 

 was questionable whether or not he would live to reach 

 the Indian villages, which were probably his goal. He 

 was not a man to feel remorse — ^never a common feeling; 

 but surely that murderer was in a living hell, as, with 

 fever and famine leering at him from the shadows, he 

 made his way through the empty desolation of the wilder- 

 ness. Fran9a, the cook, quoted out of the melancholy 

 proverbial philosophy of the people the proverb: "No 

 man knows the heart of any one"; and then expressed 

 with deep conviction a weird ghostly belief I had never 

 encountered before: "Paishon is following Julio now, 

 and will follow him until he dies; Paishon fell forward 

 on his hands and knees, and when a murdered man falls 

 like that his ghost will follow the slayer as long as the 

 slayer lives." 



We did not attempt to pursue the murderer. We 

 could not legally put him to death, although he was a 

 soldier who in cold blood had just deliberately killed a 

 fellow soldier. If we had been near civilization we would 

 have done our best to bring him in and turn him over to 

 justice. But we were in the wilderness, and how many 

 weeks* journey were ahead of us we could not tell. Our 

 food was running low, sickness was beginning to appear 

 among the men, and both their courage and their strength 

 were gradually ebbing. Our first duty was to save the 

 lives and the health of the men of the expedition who had 



