on. Zu Pfeiffer lighted a cigar
and added impersonally:

"The prisoner and escort will leave to-morrow morning. Sergeant Schneider,
remove the prisoner!"

Birnier's face was a little paler, the eyes were slightly more bloodshot;
but he did not attempt to speak. Zu Pfeiffer rose. The sergeants stood to
attention and saluted. As he left the room towards the Court House, he
smiled with slight satisfaction as the gruff voice of Sergeant Schneider
barked: "Prisoner, shun! Right turn! Quick marrch!"

But zu Pfeiffer did not remain long in the Court House. After fidgeting
about with papers on the table and reprimanding Sergeant Schultz because
he had not arranged the next native case to his satisfaction, he rose
abruptly and marched swiftly across the square in the brilliant glare
without his helmet and into his study. There he straddled a chair and
leaned on the back sucking a dead cigar absent-mindedly. As he stared at
the portrait in the ivory frame, the blue eyes grew soft and the delicate
lips quivered like a child about to weep. He sighed heavily and then
rapping out an oath, rose violently, overturning the chair, poured out a
half-glass of neat cognac, and drank it at a gulp. As he neared the Court
House the sentry, turning at the end of his short beat, was so startled at
the proximity of the Kommandant, or incompletely disciplined, that he
became flurried. Zu Pfeiffer clicked his heels together and haughtily
watched the fumbled efforts to salute. The bolt caught in the man's tunic.
Gold flashed in the sun as the sjambok descended. Zu Pfeiffer walked on
unconcernedly, leaving a grey weal on the terrified native's face. To
Sergeant Schultz, rigid in the doorway, he snapped an order to have fifty
lashes given to the "clumsy dog."

Sentences were harsher than usual that morning. All the native world about
him knew that a demon had taken possession of the Eater-of-men; he was
usually inhabited by an evil spirit, but this time the demon of Bakra who,
as everybody knows, tears the vitals with hot claws, making the victim to
have fits, to foam at the mouth, to be quite mad, had entered the white
man. Bakunjala, coming to the Court House with vermouth and biscuits at
eleven o'clock, distinctly saw the devil glaring through zu Pfeiffer's
eyes, and was so scared that he let fall the tray, which was the reason
that he also was doomed to have twenty-five lashes that evening. Even the
stolid Sergeant Schultz remarked that the Her