r's heart out to the
innocent babe, while still she suffered from disappointment that she
had been deceived in its identity.

"Have you no idea whose child this is?" she asked Anderssen.

The man shook his head.

"Not now," he said. "If he ain't ban your kid, Ay don' know whose kid
he do ban. Rokoff said it was yours. Ay tank he tank so, too.

"What do we do with it now? Ay can't go back to the Kincaid. Rokoff
would have me shot; but you can go back. Ay take you to the sea, and
then some of these black men they take you to the ship--eh?"

"No! no!" cried Jane. "Not for the world. I would rather die than
fall into the hands of that man again. No, let us go on and take this
poor little creature with us. If God is willing we shall be saved in
one way or another."

So they again took up their flight through the wilderness, taking with
them a half-dozen of the Mosulas to carry provisions and the tents that
Anderssen had smuggled aboard the small boat in preparation for the
attempted escape.

The days and nights of torture that the young woman suffered were so
merged into one long, unbroken nightmare of hideousness that she soon
lost all track of time. Whether they had been wandering for days or
years she could not tell. The one bright spot in that eternity of
fear and suffering was the little child whose tiny hands had long since
fastened their softly groping fingers firmly about her heart.

In a way the little thing took the place and filled the aching void
that the theft of her own baby had left. It could never be the same,
of course, but yet, day by day, she found her mother-love, enveloping
the waif more closely until she sometimes sat with closed eyes lost in
the sweet imagining that the little bundle of humanity at her breast
was truly her own.

For some time their progress inland was extremely slow. Word came to
them from time to time through natives passing from the coast on
hunting excursions that Rokoff had not yet guessed the direction of
their flight. This, and the desire to make the journey as light as
possible for the gently bred woman, kept Anderssen to a slow advance of
short and easy marches with many rests.

The Swede insisted upon carrying the child while they travelled, and in
countless other ways did what he could to help Jane Clayton conserve
her strength. He had been terribly chagrined on discovering the
mistake he had made in the identity of the baby, but once the young