arning to all other stealers of men not to cross
the borders of the Mazitu."

I listened to this atrocious sentence with horror, then gasped out:

"We are not stealers of men, O King, we are freers of men, as Tom and
Jerry of your own people could tell you."

"Who are Tom and Jerry?" he asked, indifferently. "Well, it does not
matter, for doubtless they are liars like the rest of you. I have
spoken. Take them away, feed them well and keep them safe till within an
hour of sunset on the second day from this."

Then, without giving us any further opportunity of speaking, Bausi rose,
and followed by Imbozwi and his councillors, marched off into his big
hut. We too, were marched off, this time under a double guard commanded
by someone whom I had not seen before. At the gate of the kraal we
halted and asked for the arms that had been taken from us. No answer was
given; only the soldiers put their hands upon our shoulders and thrust
us along.

"This is a nice business," I whispered to Stephen.

"Oh! it doesn't matter," he answered. "There are lots more guns in the
huts. I am told that these Mazitus are dreadfully afraid of bullets. So
all we have to do is just to break out and shoot our way through them,
for of course they will run when we begin to fire."

I looked at him but did not answer, for to tell the truth I felt in no
mood for argument.

Presently we arrived at our quarters, where the soldiers left us, to
camp outside. Full of his warlike plan, Stephen went at once to the hut
in which the slavers' guns had been stored with our own spare rifles and
all the ammunition. I saw him emerge looking very blank indeed and asked
him what was the matter.

"Matter!" he answered in a voice that for once really was full of
dismay. "The matter is that those Mazitu have stolen all the guns
and all the ammunition. There's not enough powder left to make a blue
devil."

"Well," I replied, with the kind of joke one perpetrates under such
circumstances, "we shall have plenty of blue devils without making any
more."

Truly ours was a dreadful situation. Let the reader imagine it. Within
a little more than forty-eight hours we were to be shot to death with
arrows if an erratic old gentleman who, for aught I knew might be
dead, did not turn up at what was then one of the remotest and most
inaccessible spots in Central Africa. Moreover, our only hope that such
a thing would happen, if hope it could be called, was the prophecy of