"This madman must not live!" he shouted.
Bannister answered slowly, in the same quiet voice in which he had spoken before.
"I am inclined to think you right," said he. "His very existence upon the face of the earth is a blot upon Creation. The sound of that hideous laughter robs the wilderness of all its beauty."
"Then, after him!" cried Forsyth.
"Leave that to me," said Bannister.
He opened his rifle, and slipped a cartridge into the breech. I heard the click of the lock, and I saw how tightly his right hand gripped the small of the butt. And I knew that death was still in the pot, that we were not yet at the end of all this strife and horrid bloodshed.
We went forward in pursuit, Bannister leading, hot upon the trail, the other three of us following at his heels.
All that afternoon we journeyed in a direction north-eastward, so far as we could judge. And from time to time we heard the shrill, savage laughter of that maniac, but a little way before us. And each time we heard it, we were filled with dread--the dread that comes naturally to one who finds himself confronted by the supernatural--the same dread that is believed to make the human hair to stand on end in the presence of a ghost.
For Amos Baverstock, body, mind, and soul, was still in the possession of his seven raging devils; and it was as if these evil spirits infested the humid, stifling atmosphere of the very jungle through which we passed in hot pursuit. Hitherto, we had been adventurers in a savage land; we had walked in the midst of dangers that were material and real. But now, with that unearthly laughter for ever in our ears, we felt that we were wayfarers in the dark nether regions, that not only our lives, but our very souls as well, were in peril of perdition, of everlasting death. The fleeting shadows of the Wood were to us the twilight of the Underworld. We were opposed by forces stronger and more evil than wild beasts and wicked men.
Darkness caught us before we had overtaken the madman whom we chased. How he had managed to elude us for so long is little short of a miracle; for he was weighed down by the gold he carried on his back. There were times when he was quite near to us, when we could distinctly hear him breaking his way through the thickets, rushing blindly onward. And at such times he was silent--ominously silent. But he would always, quite suddenly, shoot ahead again--how, we could not tell--and presently, we would hear his wild laughter as before, far away from us--laughter in which there was something of triumphant glee, as well as lunacy and senseless mirth, incomprehensible and terrible to hear.