www.freeclassicebooks.com

Come," said Usanga and he led the Englishman to the doorway of the hut.

Look," he said, and pointed a black forefinger toward the end of the village street

where a wider space between the huts left a sort of plaza.

Here Lieutenant Harold Percy Smith-Oldwick saw a number of Negresses engaged

in laying fagots around a stake and in preparing fires beneath a number of large

cooking vessels. The sinister suggestion was only too obvious.

Usanga was eyeing the white man closely, but if he expected to be rewarded by

any signs of fear, he was doomed to disappointment and the young lieutenant

merely turned toward him with a shrug: "Really now, do you beggars intend

eating me?"

Not my people," replied Usanga. "We do not eat human flesh, but the Wamabos

do. It is they who will eat you, but we will kill you for the feast, Englishman."

The Englishman remained standing in the doorway of the hut, an interested

spectator of the preparations for the coming orgy that was so horribly to

terminate his earthly existence. It can hardly be assumed that he felt no fear; yet,

if he did, he hid it perfectly beneath an imperturbable mask of coolness. Even

the brutal Usanga must have been impressed by the bravery of his victim since,

though he had come to abuse and possibly to torture the helpless prisoner, he

now did neither, contenting himself merely with berating whites as a race and

Englishmen especially, because of the terror the British aviators had caused

Germany's native troops in East Africa.

"No more," he concluded, "will your great bird fly over our people dropping death

among them from the skies--Usanga will see to that," and he walked abruptly

away toward a group of his own fighting men who were congregated near the

stake where they were laughing and joking with the women.

A few minutes later the Englishman saw them pass out of the village gate, and

once again his thoughts reverted to various futile plans for escape.

Several miles north of the village on a little rise of ground close to the river where

the jungle, halting at the base of a knoll, had left a few acres of grassy land

sparsely wooded, a man and a girl were busily engaged in constructing a small

boma, in the center of which a thatched hut already had been erected.

They worked almost in silence with only an occasional word of direction or

interrogation between them.

Except for a loin cloth, the man was naked, his smooth skin tanned to a deep

brown by the action of sun and wind. He moved with the graceful ease of a jungle

Tarzan the Untamed