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blacks. At last the old officer gave it up, and, shaking his head, gave instructions

for my removal.

From his office I was led to a guardhouse, in which I found about fifty half-naked

whites, clad in the skins of wild beasts. I tried to converse with them, but not

one of them could understand Pan-American, nor could I make head or tail of

their jargon.

For over a month I remained a prisoner there, working from morning until night

at odd jobs about the headquarters building of the commanding officer. The

other prisoners worked harder than I did, and I owe my better treatment solely to

the kindliness and discrimination of the old colonel.

What had become of Victory, of Delcarte, of Taylor I could not know; nor did it

seem likely that I should ever learn. I was most depressed. But I whiled away my

time in performing the duties given me to the best of my ability and attempting to

learn the language of my captors.

Who they were or where they came from was a mystery to me. That they were the

outpost of some powerful black nation seemed likely, yet where the seat of that

nation lay I could not guess.

They looked upon the whites as their inferiors, and treated us accordingly. They

had a literature of their own, and many of the men, even the common soldiers,

were omnivorous readers. Every two weeks a dust-covered trooper would trot his

jaded mount into the post and deliver a bulging sack of mail at headquarters.

The next day he would be away again upon a fresh horse toward the south,

carrying the soldiers' letters to friends in the far off land of mystery from whence

they all had come.

Troops, sometimes mounted and sometimes afoot, left the post daily for what I

assumed to be patrol duty. I judged the little force of a thousand men were

detailed here to maintain the authority of a distant government in a conquered

country. Later, I learned that my surmise was correct, and this was but one of a

great chain of similar posts that dotted the new frontier of the black nation into

whose hands I had fallen.

Slowly I learned their tongue, so that I could understand what was said before

me, and make myself understood. I had seen from the first that I was being

treated as a slave--that all whites that fell into the hands of the blacks were thus

treated.

Almost daily new prisoners were brought in, and about three weeks after I was

brought in to the post a troop of cavalry came from the south to relieve one of the

The Lost Continent