he pushed the young officer roughly
toward a hut in the center of the village, where he was left under
guard of two stalwart warriors.

For an hour or more the prisoner was left to his own devices, which
consisted in vain and unremitting attempts to loosen the strands
which fettered his wrists, and then he was interrupted by the
appearance of the black sergeant Usanga, who entered his hut and
approached him.

"What are they going to do with me?" asked the Englishman. "My
country is not at war with these people. You speak their language.
Tell them that I am not an enemy, that my people are the friends
of the black people and that they must let me go in peace."

Usanga laughed. "They do not know an Englishman from a German," he
replied. "It is nothing to them what you are, except that you are
a white man and an enemy."

"Then why did they take me alive?" asked the lieutenant.

"Come," said Usanga and he led the Englishman to the doorway of
the hut. "Look," he said, and pointed a black forefinger toward
the end of the village street where a wider space between the huts
left a sort of plaza.

Here Lieutenant Harold Percy Smith-Oldwick saw a number of Negresses
engaged in laying fagots around a stake and in preparing fires
beneath a number of large cooking vessels. The sinister suggestion
was only too obvious.

Usanga was eyeing the white man closely, but if he expected to be
rewarded by any signs of fear, he was doomed to disappointment and
the young lieutenant merely turned toward him with a shrug: "Really
now, do you beggars intend eating me?"

"Not my people," replied Usanga. "We do not eat human flesh, but
the Wamabos do. It is they who will eat you, but we will kill you
for the feast, Englishman."

The Englishman remained standing in the doorway of the hut, an
interested spectator of the preparations for the coming orgy that
was so horribly to terminate his earthly existence. It can hardly
be assumed that he felt no fear; yet, if he did, he hid it perfectly
beneath an imperturbable mask of coolness. Even the brutal Usanga
must have been impressed by the bravery of his victim since, though
he had come to abuse and possibly to torture the helpless prisoner,
he now did neither, contenting himself merely with berating whites
as a race and Englishmen especially, because of the terror the
British aviators had caused Germany's native troops in East Africa.

"No more," he concluded, "will your great bird fly ov