quickly and so easily that the girl did not comprehend what had befallen
her for several minutes.

In the darkness of the forest she could not clearly distinguish the
forms or features of her abductors, though she reasoned, as was only
natural, that Skipper Simms' party had become aware of the plot against
them and had taken this means of thwarting a part of it; but when her
captors turned directly into the mazes of the jungle, away from the
coast, she began first to wonder and then to doubt, so that presently
when a small clearing let the moonlight full upon them she was not
surprised to discover that none of the members of the Halfmoon's company
was among her guard.

Barbara Harding had not circled the globe half a dozen times for
nothing. There were few races or nations with whose history, past and
present, she was not fairly familiar, and so the sight that greeted
her eyes was well suited to fill her with astonishment, for she found
herself in the hands of what appeared to be a party of Japanese warriors
of the fifteenth or sixteenth century. She recognized the medieval arms
and armor, the ancient helmets, the hairdressing of the two-sworded men
of old Japan. At the belts of two of her captors dangled grisly trophies
of the hunt. In the moonlight she saw that they were the heads of Miller
and Swenson.

The girl was horrified. She had thought her lot before as bad as it
could be, but to be in the clutches of these strange, fierce warriors of
a long-dead age was unthinkably worse. That she could ever have wished
to be back upon the Halfmoon would have seemed, a few days since,
incredible; yet that was precisely what she longed for now.

On through the night marched the little, brown men--grim and
silent--until at last they came to a small village in a valley away from
the coast--a valley that lay nestled high among lofty mountains. Here
were cavelike dwellings burrowed half under ground, the upper walls and
thatched roofs rising scarce four feet above the level. Granaries on
stilts were dotted here and there among the dwellings.

Into one of the filthy dens Barbara Harding was dragged. She found a
single room in which several native and half-caste women were sleeping,
about them stretched and curled and perched a motley throng of dirty
yellow children, dogs, pigs, and chickens. It was the palace of Daimio
Oda Yorimoto, Lord of Yoka, as his ancestors had christened their new
island home.

Once within the warren