Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/60

 Kûlop Rîau stood looking on with the air of a craftsman surveying his masterpieces.

Dazed and broken-hearted, Kria stood for a space gazing down upon his wife's peaceful face. It seemed to him as though she slept, as he so often had seen her sleeping in that house to which her fitful presence had brought such an intoxication of delight; and suddenly all anger was dead within him, and there surged up in its place all manner of tender and endearing memories of this dead girl who had been to him at once his torture and his joy.

With a face livid and working, he turned savagely upon Kûlop Rîau.

"And the man," he cried. "What of the man?"

"He lies yonder," said Kûlop Rîau, with the triumphant air of an artist whose work can defy criticism, and he pointed with his chin, Malayan fashion, in the direction of a clump of bush near the edge of the salt lick. "I shot him as he fled, See, they were camped for the night in the man-nest which they had built for themselves in the tree fork up there, animals and strangers to modesty that they were!" He expectorated emphatically in token of his unutterable disgust.

Kria strode to the spot, gazed for an instant, and then gave a great cry of pain and rage and misery.

"The man is her brother," he yelled. "And you—you have killed her who was guiltless of all sin!"

"Is that so?" said Kûlop calmly. "Then, very certainly, it was so decreed by Fate, the inscrutable, and by Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate!