ill be lenient. One hundred lashes!"

The interpreter translated, and the woman screamed. An askari seized
her by the shoulders. She clung to him, but he threw her to the
ground, and another one tore off the blanket that would have deadened
the blows to some extent. She begged, and clung to their feet, but the
blows began to rain on her, and presently she lay still, her breasts
flattened against the earth floor, her mouth full of dust, and her
naked body paralyzed by fear of the descending lash.

"Now bring up number one again!" the lieutenant ordered.

The askaris ceased from flogging him. One of them kicked him to his
feet, and he resumed his stand in front of the lieutenant, looking up
at him as proudly as ever, for all that his back was bruised and bloody.

"Did you steal or did you not?" asked the lieutenant.

"Steal what from whom?"

"Oh, go on beating him! Next case!"

The next man escaped the whip, but his witnesses were less
fortunate. He brought two men and a woman with him to prove an alibi
on a charge of attempted theft, and the glibness of their answers
convinced the lieutenant they were lying. In the absence of all
evidence for the prosecution except the unsupported word of a police
askari who admitted a personal grudge against the defendant, the
lieutenant resorted to the whip to change the witnesses' convictions,
but without avail.

The woman yelled under the lash like a demented thing, but, far from
withdrawing her statements, tried to spit in the lieutenant's face when
jerked to her feet and stood again before him--an impossible feat
because the platform on which he sat at the table was too high. He had
her beaten a second time for spitting.

The next man was a fat Baganda from British territory, charged with
trading without a license. He pleaded ignorance of the law, and denied
having traded. He was flogged for telling lies in court, and changed
his testimony under the lash, whereat he was promptly sentenced to a
hundred and fifty lashes and a month on the chain-gang. Under the lash
a second time, he recanted--swore that his first statements had been
true and that he had done no trading--a mistake in tactics that only
caused the tale of lashes to be increased by fifty and the term on the
chain-gang to be doubled.

"You must learn that the methods taught you on British territory are of
no use here!" remarked the lieutenant.

By the time Kazimoto was called and stood out alone in