ith a view to this election, been revived
by the London evening paper which originally made it. He regretted also
to notice that his opponent had accepted the story, and was making use of
it to prejudice him in the eyes of the electors. Accordingly he felt
bound to put the facts simply and briefly before his audience, although
the indifference of the Colonial Office to what, if true, was a crime
committed by an Englishman on English soil, and against practically
English subjects, in effect acquitted him of the charge.

Drake thereupon proceeded to describe his march to Boruwimi. The story,
modestly recited in simple nervous English, did more to forward his
candidature than all the political speeches he could have made during a
twelvemonth. It came pat at the right time, when arguments were growing
stale. His listeners hung upon the words; in the intense silence Fielding
could feel the sympathy between speaker and audience flowing to and fro
between them like a current. Drake instinctively lowered his voice; it
thrilled through the hall the more convincingly. There was a perceptible
sway of heads forwards, which started at the back and ran from line to
line towards the platform like a quick ripple across a smooth sea. It was
as though this crowded pack of men and women was drawn to move towards
the speaker, where indeed there was no room at all to move.

And in truth the subject was one to stir the blood. Drake prefaced his
account by a description of the geography of Boruwimi; he instanced
briefly the iniquities of the Arab slave-dealers whom he was attacking.
Thereupon he contrasted the numbers of his little force with the horde of
his enemies, and dwelt for a second upon their skill as marksmen; so that
his auditors, following him as he hewed his path through the tangle of an
untrodden forest, felt that each obstacle he stopped at might mean not
merely failure to the expedition, but death to all who shared in it.
Success and life were one and the same thing, and the condition of that
thing was speed. He must fall upon the Arabs unawares, like a bolt from
the blue. They forgot that he who led that expedition was speaking to
them now; they were with him in the obscure depths of the undergrowth,
surging against gigantic barriers of fallen tree-trunks, twenty, thirty
feet high; they were marching behind him, like him at grips with nature
in a six-weeks' struggle of life and death; and when finally he burst
into the cleari