re was
sport prepared for them this morning under the few palm trees before the
house of the Emir Wad El Nejoumi. A white prisoner captured a week
before close to the wells of El Agia on the great Arbain road, by a
party of Arabs, had been brought in during the night and now waited his
fate at the Emir's hands. The news spread quick as a spark through the
town; already crowds of men and women and children flocked to this rare
and pleasant spectacle. In front of the palm trees an open space
stretched to the gateway of the Emir's house; behind them a slope of
sand descended flat and bare to the river.

Harry Feversham was standing under the trees, guarded by four of the
Ansar soldiery. His clothes had been stripped from him; he wore only a
torn and ragged jibbeh upon his body and a twist of cotton on his head
to shield him from the sun. His bare shoulders and arms were scorched
and blistered. His ankles were fettered, his wrists were bound with a
rope of palm fibre, an iron collar was locked about his neck, to which a
chain was attached, and this chain one of the soldiers held. He stood
and smiled at the mocking crowd about him and seemed well pleased, like
a lunatic.

That was the character which he had assumed. If he could sustain it, if
he could baffle his captors, so that they were at a loss whether he was
a man really daft or an agent with promises of help and arms to the
disaffected tribes of Kordofan--then there was a chance that they might
fear to dispose of him themselves and send him forward to Omdurman. But
it was hard work. Inside the house the Emir and his counsellors were
debating his destiny; on the river-bank and within his view a high
gallows stood out black and most sinister against the yellow sand. Harry
Feversham was very glad of the chain about his neck and the fetters on
his legs. They helped him to betray no panic, by assuring him of its
futility.

These hours of waiting, while the sun rose higher and higher and no one
came from the gateway, were the worst he had ever as yet endured. All
through that fortnight in Berber a hope of escape had sustained him, and
when that lantern shone upon him from behind in the ruined acres, what
had to be done must be done so quickly there was no time for fear or
thought. Here there was time and too much of it.

He had time to anticipate and foresee. He felt his heart sinking till
he was faint, just as in those distant days when he had heard the hounds
scufflin