er our people
dropping death among them from the skies--Usanga will see to that,"
and he walked abruptly away toward a group of his own fighting men
who were congregated near the stake where they were laughing and
joking with the women.

A few minutes later the Englishman saw them pass out of the village
gate, and once again his thoughts reverted to various futile plans
for escape.

Several miles north of the village on a little rise of ground close
to the river where the jungle, halting at the base of a knoll, had
left a few acres of grassy land sparsely wooded, a man and a girl
were busily engaged in constructing a small boma, in the center of
which a thatched hut already had been erected.

They worked almost in silence with only an occasional word of
direction or interrogation between them.

Except for a loin cloth, the man was naked, his smooth skin tanned
to a deep brown by the action of sun and wind. He moved with the
graceful ease of a jungle cat and when he lifted heavy weights,
the action seemed as effortless as the raising of empty hands.

When he was not looking at her, and it was seldom that he did, the
girl found her eyes wandering toward him, and at such times there
was always a puzzled expression upon her face as though she found
in him an enigma which she could not solve. As a matter of fact,
her feelings toward him were not un-tinged with awe, since in
the brief period of their association she had discovered in this
handsome, godlike giant the attributes of the superman and the
savage beast closely intermingled. At first she had felt only that
unreasoning feminine terror which her unhappy position naturally
induced.

To be alone in the heart of an unexplored wilderness of Central
Africa with a savage wild man was in itself sufficiently appalling,
but to feel also that this man was a blood enemy, that he hated her
and her kind and that in addition thereto he owed her a personal
grudge for an attack she had made upon him in the past, left no
loophole for any hope that he might accord her even the minutest
measure of consideration.

She had seen him first months since when he had entered the
headquarters of the German high command in East Africa and carried
off the luckless Major Schneider, of whose fate no hint had ever
reached the German officers; and she had seen him again upon that
occasion when he had rescued her from the clutches of the lion and,
after explaining to her that he had recogn