"During the following days I really began--though I'm not an imaginative chap--to feel a bit queer about things. Graham couldn't shake off his fever, and more than once when he was delirious in the evenings he would startle me by saying, 'What's that?' But he would laugh the next moment, and add, 'Only a tree, of course; it was the light.' "There was no doctor within miles; and, besides, it was not really such a bad case as all that. At least it didn't seem so to me or to Graham himself. Only to old Bunder, who became quite a nuisance with his warnings, so that I was glad when, after a confused rigmarole about white cocks and sacrifices, he disappeared one day and was seen no more. Partly, perhaps, because we moved back to a higher camp in the hopes of escaping the malaria. "But we didn't. Graham grew appreciably worse. He was fairly well by day; it was at night that the fever seemed to grip him. I used to sit up with him till twelve or one o'clock, and then turn in till about dawn, when the servants had orders to call me, and I would go over and see after him again. "But one day, or rather night, it was still quite dark when my bearer roused me with his persistent drone of '_Saheeb, saheeb!_' and I knew in an instant something was wrong. Graham, shortly after I left him, had got out of bed, dressed himself in his shikar clothes, taken his gun, and gone away from the camp. His bearer, a lad whom he had promoted to the place in one of his impulsive generous fits of revolt against things unjustifiable, had failed to take alarm until his master's prolonged absence had made him seek and rouse my man. The latter was full of apologies; but what else, he protested, could be expected of babes and sucklings promoted out of due season? The babe and suckling meanwhile was blubbering incoherently, and asserting that he was not to blame. The _sahib_ had called for Bunder and Bunder had come; and they had gone off together. "'Bunder?' I exclaimed. 'Impossible! He hasn't been near the camp for days. Did any one else see him?' But no one had. And as there was no time to be lost in inquiries I dismissed the idea as an attempt on the boy's part to relieve himself from responsibility, and organised the whole camp into a search party.