CHAPTER XVII. HOME AGAIN
BILLY BYRNE continued to fire intermittently for half an hour after the two men had left him. Then he fired several shots in quick succession, and dragging himself to his hands and knees crawled laboriously and painfully back into the jungle in search of a hiding place where he might die in peace.
He had progressed some hundred yards when he felt the earth give way beneath him. He clutched frantically about for support, but there was none, and with a sickening lunge he plunged downward into Stygian darkness.
His fall was a short one, and he brought up with a painful thud at the bottom of a deer pit—a covered trap which the natives dig to catch their fleet-footed prey.
The pain of his wounds after the fall was excruciating. His head whirled dizzily. He knew that
