Well, it is just; for if you could have had your way, your end would have been my end." Then very leisurely, as one who is sure that he will not be interrupted, Hokosa began to climb the tree, till at length some of the green fingers were within his reach.

Resting his back against a bough, one by one he broke off several of them, and averting his face so that the fumes of it might not reach him, he caused the thick milk-white juice that they contained to trickle into the mouth of a little gourd which was hung about his neck by a string.

When he had collected enough of the poison and carefully corked the gourd with a plug of wood, he descended the tree again.

At the great fork where the main branches sprang from the trunk, he stood a while contemplating a creeping plant which ran up them.

It was a plant of naked stem, like the tree it grew upon; and, also like the tree, its leaves consisted of bunches of green spikes having a milky juice.
"Strange," he said aloud, "that Nature should set the bane and the antidote side by side, the one twined about the other.