even as I did say?"

"O mighty one!"

"But that is only as the goat to the leopard. The trap must be dug--or the
scent of the bait will be blown."

"Ehh!" gasped Bakuma, in desperation, "by my twin soul which dwells
beneath the banana plant, will I do it!"

CHAPTER 7

Gerald Birnier had flattered himself that he was a philosopher with a
sense of humour, fairly well developed by ten years' wandering about
Central Africa, but deep emotions submerge such cherished qualities.

The presence of the photograph was explicable by several surmises: zu
Pfeiffer might have met Lucille at Washington, Paris, or Berlin: she might
have given him the photograph or he might have bought it, or even stolen
it. But--the signature "a toi, Lucille"! There lay the sting which maddened
Birnier and strangled reason, the fact at which his mind yawed futilely.

So great had been the shock that the arrest had seemed but a secondary
matter in accord with the insanity of zu Pfeiffer's statement that he was
engaged to Lucille. The affair had been so sudden that for some time he
could progress no farther in an attempt to think than a gasp, pawing
mentally at an intangible substance which eluded him like a child's small
hand trying to grasp a toy balloon. Sense of reality appeared to have been
dissolved. He had followed the sergeant across the square meekly without
realising what was happening, and when he had been placed in a whitewashed
room at the back of the native guard house which served as a jail, he sat
down upon a chair, too bewildered to comprehend where he was. That "a toi,
Lucille" rang like the clanging in a belfry, drowning the sound of other
thoughts.

By the light of a hurricane lamp he regarded the soldiers bringing in an
old camp bed with indifference. When they had gone he began to pace up and
down the small room frantically trying to gain control. To the first
prompting of a logical reason for the whole affair he did not dare to
listen. The disrupting cause was the complete inability to explain the
familiar signature. To his Anglo-Saxonised mind, bred in the strict code
of the south, tutoyer was only permissible to dogs, inferiors, most
intimate relations and lovers. He was far too unbalanced to see the humour
as he solemnly announced that certainly zu Pfeiffer was not a dog, nor in
the social code an inferior; he was not a relation; therefore.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} His mind
baulked