rs it is this one. The vigour of his powerful
frame is apparent with every movement, and the strength and fixity of
will expressed in his keen dark face there is no mistaking. But the
black, piercing eyes and bronzed features belong to no Arab, no half
caste. He is a white man, a European.

Stay! To be accurate, there is just a strain of Arab in him; faint,
indeed, as of several generations intervening, yet real enough to
qualify him for mysterious rites of blood brotherhood with some of the
most powerful chiefs from Tanganyika to Khartoum. And throughout the
Congo territory, and many an equatorial tribe beyond, this man's name
has been known and feared. No leader of slave-hunters can come near him
for bold and wide-sweeping raids, the terror and unexpectedness of
which, together with the complete and ruthless fixity of purpose
wherewith the objects of them, however strong, however alert, are struck
and promptly subjugated, have gained for him among his followers and
allies the sobriquet of El Khanac, "The Strangler." But the
reader--together with Johannesburg at large--knows him under another
name, and that is "Pirate" Hazon.

"Is it prudent, think you, Lutali?" he is saying. "Consider. These
Wajalu are a trifle too near the land of the Ba-gcatya. Indeed, we
ourselves are too near it now, and a day's journey or more in the same
direction is it not to run our heads into the jaws of the lion?"

"Allah is great, my brother," replies the Arab, with a shrug of the
shoulders. "But I would ask, what have we, in our numbers and with arms
such as these," gripping significantly his Express rifle, "to fear from
those devil-worshippers armed with spears and shields--yea, even the
whole nation of them?"

"Yet I have seen an army of the nation of which those
'devil-worshippers' are sprung, armed only with spears and shields, eat
up a force three times as large as our own and infinitely better armed,
I being one of the few who escaped. And 'The People of the Spider'
cannot, from all accounts, be inferior to the stock whence they came."

Lutali shrugs his shoulders again.

"It may be so," he says, "yet there is a large village of these Wajalu
which would prove an easy capture and would complete the number we
need."

"Then let us chance it," is Hazon's rejoinder.

The Arab makes a murmur of assent and stalks away to his own people,
while Hazon returns to where he has left his white colleague.

"Well, Holmes, according to Lut