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little earlier release from the hideous anguish that she had been enduring. She
must find some way to take her own life before the Russian could harm her
further.
Just now she wanted time--time to think and prepare herself for the end. She felt
that she could not take the last, awful step until she had exhausted every
possibility of escape. She did not care to live unless she might find her way back
to her own child, but slight as such a hope appeared she would not admit its
impossibility until the last moment had come, and she faced the fearful reality of
choosing between the final alternatives--Nikolas Rokoff on one hand and self-
destruction upon the other.
"Go away!" she said to the Russian. "Go away and leave me in peace with my
dead. Have you not brought sufficient misery and anguish upon me without
attempting to harm me further? What wrong have I ever done you that you
should persist in persecuting me?"
"You are suffering for the sins of the monkey you chose when you might have had
the love of a gentleman--of Nikolas Rokoff," he replied. "But where is the use in
discussing the matter? We shall bury the child here, and you will return with me
at once to my own camp. Tomorrow I shall bring you back and turn you over to
your new husband--the lovely M'ganwazam. Come!"
He reached out for the child. Jane, who was on her feet now, turned away from
him.
"I shall bury the body," she said. "Send some men to dig a grave outside the
village."
Rokoff was anxious to have the thing over and get back to his camp with his
victim. He thought he saw in her apathy a resignation to her fate. Stepping
outside the hut, he motioned her to follow him, and a moment later, with his
men, he escorted Jane beyond the village, where beneath a great tree the blacks
scooped a shallow grave.
Wrapping the tiny body in a blanket, Jane laid it tenderly in the black hole, and,
turning her head that she might not see the mouldy earth falling upon the pitiful
little bundle, she breathed a prayer beside the grave of the nameless waif that
had won its way to the innermost recesses of her heart.
Then, dry-eyed but suffering, she rose and followed the Russian through the
Stygian blackness of the jungle, along the winding, leafy corridor that led from
the village of M'ganwazam, the black cannibal, to the camp of Nikolas Rokoff, the
white fiend.
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