ss German
oppressors. While here only hardships and discomforts assailed her,
Obergatz himself being held in leash by the orders of his distant
superior but as time went on the life in the village grew to be a
veritable hell of cruelties and oppressions practiced by the arrogant
Prussian upon the villagers and the members of his native command--for
time hung heavily upon the hands of the lieutenant and with idleness
combining with the personal discomforts he was compelled to endure, his
none too agreeable temper found an outlet first in petty interference
with the chiefs and later in the practice of absolute cruelties upon
them.

What the self-sufficient German could not see was plain to Jane
Clayton--that the sympathies of Obergatz' native soldiers lay with the
villagers and that all were so heartily sickened by his abuse that it
needed now but the slightest spark to detonate the mine of revenge and
hatred that the pig-headed Hun had been assiduously fabricating beneath
his own person.

And at last it came, but from an unexpected source in the form of a
German native deserter from the theater of war. Footsore, weary, and
spent, he dragged himself into the village late one afternoon, and
before Obergatz was even aware of his presence the whole village knew
that the power of Germany in Africa was at an end. It did not take long
for the lieutenant's native soldiers to realize that the authority that
held them in service no longer existed and that with it had gone the
power to pay them their miserable wage. Or at least, so they reasoned.
To them Obergatz no longer represented aught else than a powerless and
hated foreigner, and short indeed would have been his shrift had not a
native woman who had conceived a doglike affection for Jane Clayton
hurried to her with word of the murderous plan, for the fate of the
innocent white woman lay in the balance beside that of the guilty
Teuton.

"Already they are quarreling as to which one shall possess you," she
told Jane.

"When will they come for us?" asked Jane. "Did you hear them say?"

"Tonight," replied the woman, "for even now that he has none to fight
for him they still fear the white man. And so they will come at night
and kill him while he sleeps."

Jane thanked the woman and sent her away lest the suspicion of her
fellows be aroused against her when they discovered that the two whites
had learned of their intentions. The woman went at once to the hut
occupied by O