By EDWIN PUGH

It was the hour of siesta. Santa Plaza lay blistering, sweltering, in the white-hot glare of the noontide sun. The dust lay thick on the roads and terraces, the copings and the roofs of the houses, like untrodden snow. The sea shone like a shield of brass reflecting a brassy sky. There was not the least sign of movement anywhere.

Then Franker, the Englishman, came limping along the Lido, sat down in the shadow of the old sea-wall, and examined with grave solicitude a swollen and blistered foot swathed in filthy, blood-stained rags.

This Franker had once been a well-known figure in all the ports of those far-off southern seas. It was whispered that in the long ago he had been a gentleman. Now he was just the sport of circumstance, a jack of all trades, so long as they were indifferent honest; sailorman, stock-rider, storekeeper, croupier, crimp, anything that happened along in his hour of need. But lately he had disappeared from his old haunts, and it was unlikely that any of his old acquaintances would have recognised in that ragged and gaunt, unwashed and black-bearded wastrel on the beach the spruce adventurer of former days.

He had the look of a hunted creature. There was fear in his eyes. Even as he sat there nursing his aching foot, parched and hungry, haggard and weary, his head was perpetually turning from side to side, and ever and again he looked over his shoulder, to left and right, as if he were in dread expectation that at any moment some enemy might creep upon him unawares. And, indeed, he was in parlous case. For he had killed a man, not in itself an exceptional incident of course—only in this instance the man was one of twins, and the other twin had vowed a vendetta against him.

These twins were named Bibi and Bobo, and the extraordinary likeness between them was accentuated by their habit of always dressing alike, talking alike, thinking alike. There were some who said that they could distinguish one twin from the other, but these were foolish, vainglorious men. The thing was manifestly impossible. Even Franker did not know whether it was Bibi or Bobo he had killed.

It happened in a gambling den in Suranim, up country. They were playing the childish game of boule, and some silly dispute had arisen. Franker had lost his temper, and knocked one of the twins down. For once in a way the other twin had not been present, or most assuredly Franker would have been chived in the back before he could turn round. As it was, he saw his fallen adversary rise slowly, slowly draw a red smear across his face with the back of his hand, and then quicken on a sudden into antic activity. There was the flash of a knife. Franker dodged. The other men stood back to watch the fun—not to see fair play. Fair play was a jewel of little value in the estimation of that crew. A moment Franker hesitated, then whipped out his gun and fired point-blank at the twin. He dropped dead. Before the smoke had cleared away or the echoes of the report had subsided into stillness, Franker had left the gambling-house and was running for his life into the wilderness.

There, for three days, he lost himself. That was his idea: to lose himself. He wanted to be lost, utterly lost to the world. For he knew that so long as the other twin lived his own chances of living were reduced to the last recurring decimal. Bibi or Bobo—whichever it was—would never rest until he had wrought vengeance on his brother’s murderer. Though it wasn’t a murder, of course, but a duel in which each had taken the same risk of death. If Franker had not killed Bibi or Bobo, Bibi or Bobo would have killed him. He wished he knew which of the twins it was he had killed. So idiotic not to know. So confusing. It made your head ache, wondering. And in your sleep you dreamed of horrible, two-headed monsters coming at you crabwise, with arms and legs all round them.

On the third day of his sojourn in the wilderness the other twin had very nearly caught him napping. He had sunk down exhausted in a sandy hollow fringed with palms, and for a moment closed his eyes. And in that moment the redness of his lowered eyelids had been suddenly clouded by a shadow. In an instant he was on his feet, wide awake again. And there was the figure of the other twin in the act of flinging itself upon him. He fired an aimless shot at that black apparition, then bolted.

And all that day and all that night he had wound and wound an intorted course through virgin forest, hoping thus to shake off his pursuer. And all that day and all that night he had known that his pursuer followed him, shadowed him, stalked him, with a merciless delight in that persecution born of an insatiate hate.

Next day Franker, having doubled on his tracks, found himself on a quayside, and had shipped as a forecastle hand on an old iron hooker bound for the Caribs with a mixed cargo. He never knew or cared what that mixed cargo consisted of. He was too busy sleeping, when he wasn’t too sore from being kicked into wakefulness, to bother about trivial details. He could have left the ship at the first of the Caribs, but an island is a prison, and his yearning was for wide free spaces where a man can at least get a run for his money. So he had returned on the hooker, and had been paid off with the lurid compliments of the purser, and was once more adrift.

But the story of his wanderings and adventures over the greater part of the southern hemisphere would fill many books. Months passed, a year passed, two years, and all the while Franker was dogged by the avenger. Ever and again, just when he thought that he had at last shaken off that deadly pursuit, the other twin turned up again. And gradually it was borne in upon him that the other twin might have killed him long since had he wished. He had had numberless opportunities, and had not taken them. This puzzled Franker a bit, and then he hit upon the truth. There is more joy in the hunting than in the killing. There is more cat-like satisfaction in the slow torture of its victim than in the crunching up of its dead bones. He began to think of the other twin as a cat-like creature, exercising a cruelty of the mind far more subtle and devilish than any mere crude cruelty of tooth and claw. When the avenger tired of the sport, then he would strike. And not till then. Meanwhile, Franker was condemned to a daily round of unremitting vigilance, ceaseless watchfulness, unending apprehension.

He had been a big man, strong and fearless, with bold eyes and the voice of a bull. Now he had become a shuffling, whimpering, trembling thing of nerves and tears, who dared look no one in the face lest it should be the face of his enemy. In the old days, with no other resources than his health and vigour, bodily and mental, he had used to take chances with an overbearing recklessness, and thrust and curse his way through the mob of other roustabouts like unto himself, with whom he had fought for the means of existence. And he had been—he realised that now—quite happy then. There were times when he told himself that he would stand fast against his pursuer, force him into the open, then turn upon him and rend him, and so make an end of this long-drawn-out agony. But when the moment came his wits fled, he was distraught and afraid, he could think only of flight.

It was now a full fortnight since he had seen Bibi—or Bobo. But there had been other fortnights during which he had not seen him. And always, inevitably, he had reappeared. So would he reappear again.

Franker gazed out from the shadow of the old seawall across the glittering, limitless sea, and wished that he might drown himself in its depths. But he was not yet quite mad enough for that. Though life had become as a nightmare to him, and death as the awakening to the cool, calm peace of dawn; though life offered nothing but torment, and death offered surcease of pain, he still clung to life. It was in the nature of his being to cling to life. He was not of the stuff that gives in.

But if only he could rest awhile! If only he could lie still in some sheltered place, safe from his enemy, and thus regain his old control over his faculties, recuperate his strength!

At the western end of the Lido, where the coast swept in a wide curve to the lighthouse and the harbour, there was a long white wall. And as he remembered what that wall enclosed, what it signified, Franker had an inspiration. His face was suddenly irradiated. He laughed aloud. What a fool!—God in Heaven!—what a fool he had been not to think of that before! He rose on tremulous legs and began to shamble along the beach towards that far-off haven of refuge.

The prison official, in his gaudy livery of gold and scarlet and his immense cocked hat, conducted him to the chief inspector’s office.

“Yes?”

Franker desired to be sworn. He had a crime to confess: it had troubled his conscience for years.

“Yes?”

An affair of opium smuggling, ship’s papers forged, and customs burked. It was a true story enough, only Franker himself had not been implicated in it. The police had been so long on the track of that crime they had given it up as hopeless. And now here there was the chief criminal, a fine fat bird, dropping into the net of his own free will. The chief inspector rubbed his dry palms together as he thought of the luscious report he would send to the magistracy.

Then he committed Franker to the custody of another prison official, less gaudy than the first, and Franker was led away to the cell.

This was a big, bare, barn-like place of stone, that sometimes contained as many as twenty prisoners huddled indiscriminately together. But just now crime was slack. Franker had the whole cell to himself.

As the gaoler slammed the door on him he fell on his knees with a weeping face, and offered up thanks for this blessed refuge, this safe harbour of retreat from his relentless enemy, this sanctuary. Here, at last, he was free from the fear of pursuit. Here, during the year or two of his imprisonment, he could rest and sleep, rest his mind and find his sleep that sweet relief from the tortures of the last two years which would gradually restore him again to health and sanity.

Even as he prayed he toppled down face forward and lay there quite still, breathing softly, evenly, in peaceful slumber.

The light was fading, there was a red stain of sunset on the wall when he awoke. It was a rattling and clanging of bolts and chains that had roused him. He sat up, blinking stupidly, at first not knowing where he was. Then, as he remembered, he shed tears of joy again, and clasped his hands together in an access of delight.

The sounds drew nearer. The heavy, barred door of the prison chamber was flung open. He saw the burly figure of a gaoler over-shadowing another smaller figure that seemed to be precipitated from behind into the misty vastness of the cell. It fell head-long at Franker’s feet, and lay there stirring feebly like a wounded beetle.

Franker watched his writhings ... and a slow, cold horror grew upon him.

His fellow-prisoner raised himself on all fours, then sat up and squatted there, cross-legged, like a Chinese bonze.

It was Bibi—or Bobo.

Franker uttered a cry.

“And hast thou found me, O mine enemy!”

The other twin had leapt to his feet. He shrank back, crouching, snarling, spitting like a cat. The moment for the happy dispatch was come at last. He drew his knife and fingered its keen blade lovingly, then came mincing on tiptoe towards Franker.

As Franker’s hands closed round his throat he drove the blade deep into Franker’s breast.