d and received,
feuds among the tribesmen end, and murders are soon forgotten. But
Mirach was so highly valued as a warrior by his people that they
offered McMillan no less than three hundred camels for his life. They
were dumbfounded when their offer was refused.

Disarmed and shackled, Mirach remained a sullen but defiant prisoner
with the caravan for the next two weeks' march, when the crossing of
the Hawash River brought them well into Abyssinian territory and made
it safe to rush him forward, in the charge of a small escort, to Adis
Ababa.

There he was tried beneath the sombre shade of the famous Judgment
Tree, condemned, and two months later hanged in the market place: and
there for days his grinning face and shrivelling carcass swung, a
menacing proof to the wildest visiting tribesmen of them all of the
vast power of the Negus Negusti.

CHAPTER XV

DJAMA AOUT'S HEROISM

"Throughout Somaliland, among a race famous for their fearlessness, the
name of Djama Aout is held a synonym for reckless courage. He did the
bravest deed I ever saw, a deed heroic in its purpose, ferociously sage
in its execution; the deed of a man bred of a race that knew no
longer-range weapon than an assegai, trained from youth to fight and
kill at arm's length or in hand grapple; a deed that, incidentally,
saved my life."

The speaker was C. W. L. Bulpett, himself well qualified by personal
experience to sit in judgment, as Court of Last Resort, on any act of
courage; a man who, at forty, without training and on a heavy wager
that he could not walk a mile, run a mile, and ride a mile, all in
sixteen and a half minutes, finished the three miles in sixteen minutes
and seven seconds; a man who, midway of a dinner at Greenwich, bet that
he could swim the half-mile across the Thames and back in his evening
clothes before the coffee was served, and did it; and who has crossed
Africa from Khartoom to the Red Sea.

If more were needed to prove Mr. Bulpett's past-mastership in
hardihood, it is perhaps sufficient to mention that he voluntarily got
himself in the fix that needed Djama Aout's aid, although in telling
the story he did not convey the impression that his own part in it was
more than secondary and inconsequential.

"We were big-game hunting, lion and rhino preferred, along the border
of Somaliland," he continued. "Besides the pony and camel men, we had
four Somali _shikaris_, trained trackers, who knew the habits of bea