nly a
few inches from mine. I saw that it was Baar!

CHAPTER XVIII.

REVOLUTION.

There seemed to be five of our captors, all of them as evil-looking men as
I think I have ever seen. They rummaged about the room, evidently in
search for weapons they thought I might have secreted. Then they ordered
me to stand up, and without more ado led Miela and me from the house.

This was once when I was glad of the interminable daylight. I hoped we
might find some early risers about the streets, for I thought certainly
the time of sleep must now be nearly over. But no one was in sight as we
left the garden. We turned the first corner and headed toward the base of
the mountain.

"To Baar's house they are taking us, I think. It is on the marshland
below." Miela spoke without fear of our captors understanding the English
words. We took advantage of this until after a moment we were roughly
ordered to be quiet.

Lua, we thought, must have been taken away before we arrived; we would
find her at Baar's house when we arrived there. We had come down to the
level marshlands now, the outskirts of the city, and were passing along a
path between occasional shacks. Before us, standing alone in a rice paddy,
I saw a larger, more pretentious house--a wooden structure on stilts, with
a thatched roof, which Miela said was where Baar lived.

We went in single file up its board incline, and entered a squalid room
with matting on the floor, a rude charcoal brazier at one side, and the
remains of a previous meal lying on a table.

Two women were in the room as we entered. I took these to be Baar's wife
and a servant. Two naked little children lay on the floor, one of them
crying lustily.

Baar glanced around as he came in, and with what I took to be an oath
ordered the children removed from the room. The slave woman--I could see
she was a slave by the band upon her arm--picked them up. Evidently she
did not move fast enough to suit Baar's temper, for as she straightened up
the man cuffed her upon the head. She stumbled to one side against Baar's
wife, who was standing there, and the other woman, with a sharp
imprecation, struck her full in the breast.

Neither of them saw the look she gave as she shuffled away, carrying the
infants; but I did. It was a look of the most intense hatred, born and
nourished, I realized, by long ill-treatment.

Miela and I were now bound securely hand and foot, and Miela's wings were
lashed to her body