k hours before the dawn he led his Houssas across the beach,
revolver in hand, but came a little too late. The surprise party had
been well planned. A speared sentry lay twisting before the chief's hut,
and Bosambo's face was smothered in blood. Bones took in the situation.

"Fire on the men who fly to the forest," he said, but Bosambo laid a
shaking hand upon his arm.

"Lord," he said, "hold your fire, for they have taken the children, and
I fear the woman my wife is stricken."

He went into the hut, Bones following.

The chief's wife had a larger hut than Bosambo's own, communicating with
her lord's through a passage of wicker and clay, and the raiders had
clubbed her to silence, but Bones knew enough of surgery to see that she
was in no danger.

In ten minutes the fighting regiments of the Ochori were sweeping
through the forest, trackers going ahead to pick up the trail.

"Let all gods hear me," sobbed Bosambo, as he ran, "and send M'gani
swiftly to M'sambo my son."

IV

"Now this is very wonderful," said Lamalana, "and it seems, O my father,
no matter for a small killing, but for a sacrifice such as all men may
see."

It was the hour following the dawn when the world was at its sweetest,
when the chattering weaver birds went in and out of their hanging nests
gossiping loudly, and faint perfumes from little morning flowers gave
the air an unusual delicacy.

All the Lombobo people, the warriors and the hunters, the wives and the
maidens, and even the children of tender years, lined the steep slopes
of the Cup of Sacrifice. For Lamalana, deaf and blind to reason, knew
that her hour was short, and that with the sun would come a man terrible
in his anger ... and the soldiers who eat up opposition with fire.

"O people!" she cried.

She was stripped to the waist, stood behind the Stone of Death as though
it were a counter, and the two squirming infants under her hands were so
much saleable stock: "Here we bring terror to all who hate us, for one
of these is the heart of Bosambo and the other is more than the heart of
the-man-who-stands-for-Sandi----"

"O woman!"

The intruder had passed unnoticed, almost it seemed by magic, through
the throng, and now he stood in the clear space of sacrifice. And there
was not one in the throng who had not heard of him with his leopard skin
and his belt of brass.

He was as black as the strange Ethiopians who came sometimes to the land
with the Arabi traders, his mu