Their clothing was, if possible, more patched and weatherworn than their tent. Five natives squatted about a cook-fire at a little distance from them. Another native was preparing food for the white men at a small fire near the tent.

"I'm sure fed up on this," remarked the older man.

"Then why don't you beat it?" demanded the other, a young man of twenty-one or twenty-two.

His companion shrugged. "Where? I'd be just another dirty bum, back in the States. Here, I at least have the satisfaction of servants, even though I know damn well they don't respect me. It gives me a certain sense of class to be waited upon. There, I'd have to wait on somebody else. But you-I can't see why you want to hang around this lousy Godforsaken country, fighting bugs and fever. You're young. You've got your whole life ahead of you and the whole world to carve it out of any way you want."

"Hell!" exclaimed the younger man. "You talk as though you were a hundred. You aren't thirty yet. You told me your age, you know, right after we threw in together."

"Thirty's old," observed the other. "A guy's got to get a start long before thirty. Why, I know fellows who made theirs and retired by the time they were thirty. Take my dad for instance-" He went silent then, quite suddenly. The other urged no confidences.

"I guess we'd be a couple of bums back there," he remarked laughing.

"You wouldn't be a bum anywhere, Kid," remonstrated his companion. He broke into sudden laughter.

"What you laughing about?"

"I was thinking about the time we met; it's just about a year now. You tried to make me think you were a tough guy from the slums. You were a pretty good actor-while you were thinking about it."

The Kid grinned. "It was a hell of a strain on my histrionic abilities," he admitted; "but, say, Old Timer, you didn't fool anybody much, yourself. To listen to you talk one would have imagined that you were born in the jungle and brought up by apes, but I tumbled to you in a hurry. I said to myself, 'Kid, it's either Yale or Princeton; more likely Yale."'

"But you didn't ask any questions. That's what I liked about you."

"And you didn't ask any. Perhaps that's why we've gotten along together so well. People who ask questions should be taken gently, but firmly, by the hand, led out behind the barn and shot. It would be a better world to live in."

"Oke, Kid; but still it's rather odd, at that, that two fellows should pal together for a year, as we have, and not know the first damn thing about one another-as though neither trusted the other."

"It isn't that with me," said the Kid; "but there are some things that a fellow just can't talk about-to any one."

"I know," agreed Old Timer. "The thing each of us can't talk about probably explains why he is here. It was a woman with me; that's why I hate 'em."

"Hooey!" scoffed the younger man. "I'd bet you fall for the first skirt you see-if I had anything to bet."

"We won't have anything to eat or any one to cook it for us if we don't have a little luck pronto," observed the other.