“You could do this?”

“With ease and with pleasure.”

He hesitated for a moment. “It is a trick,” he said suddenly. “It is a capitalist imperialist trick, a trick.”

And he went away.

I slapped a mosquito and said something obscene in Siamese. At sunrise they were going to kill me. I didn’t know how and I didn’t know why, but it hardly mattered. I had to get away, and they were not going to let me get away, and my little virginal friend had decided that he did not trust me. I hadn’t slept in seventeen years and tomorrow I would go to sleep and I would never wake up. I could barely remember what sleep was like, but the way I remembered it, the best part of it was waking up refreshed, and that was a part I couldn’t look forward to. They were going to put me to sleep, and that would be the end of it.

“You would really get me a woman?”

He had returned. It was darker now, and his voice was more urgent now, and I could guess what he had been spending his time thinking about. Capitalist imperialist trick or no, I was his one chance, just as he was mine. Alliances have been forged upon less than that.

“I will.”

“I have decided to trust you, my friend.”

“Good.”

“I shall help you.”

“They will kill me at sunrise unless we do something about it.”

“We will escape.”

“Good.”

“Together.”

“Good.”

“I go now. When it is darker, when the camp sleeps, I shall return. I go now, my friend, my good friend.”

I celebrated by slapping another mosquito. They were fairly bad during the days and considerably worse at night, and night was coming. The mosquitoes had bothered me most the first day in the jungle, but by the time I was captured the ferocity of their attack had diminished to a great extent. By now they mostly let me alone. What with my diet and my dysentery and the raids of earlier mosquitoes, I must have been running out of blood.