“Then keep up with me,” growled the Spaniard. “Do you think that with this fortune in my possession I am going to wait here forever in the middle of the jungle for someone to come and take it away from me? No, I am going on to the coast as fast as I can. If you can keep up, well and good. If you cannot, that is your own lookout.” “But you could not desert me. Even you, Esteban, could not be such a beast after all that you have forced me to do for you.” The Spaniard laughed. “You are nothing more to me,” he said, “than an old glove. With this,” and he held the sack of diamonds before him, “I can purchase the finest gloves in the capitals of the world—new gloves,” and he laughed grimly at his little joke. “Esteban, Esteban,” she cried, “come back, come back. I can go no farther. Do not leave me. Please come back and save me.” But he only laughed at her, and as a turn of the trail shut him from her sight, she sank helpless and exhausted to the ground. CHAPTER XX THE DEAD RETURN THAT night Esteban made his lonely camp beside a jungle trail that wound through the dry wash of an old river bed, along which a tiny rivulet still trickled, affording the Spaniard the water which he craved. The obsession which possessed him that he was in truth Tarzan of the Apes, imparted to him a false courage, so that he could camp alone upon the ground without recourse to artificial protection of any kind, and fortune had favored him in this respect in that it had sent no prowling beasts of prey to find him upon those occasions that he had dared too much. During the period that Flora Hawkes had been with him he had built shelters for her, but now that he had deserted her and was again alone, he could not, in the rôle that he had assumed, consider so effeminate an act as the building of even a thorn boma for protection during the darkness of the night. He did, however, build a fire, for he had made a kill and had not yet reached a point of primitive savagery which permitted him even to imagine that he enjoyed raw meat.