m. He has told me that you think him
your protector, and he has played upon this to win your confidence that
it might be easier to carry you north and sell you into some black
sultan's harem. Mohammed Beyd is your only hope," and with this
assertion to provide the captive with food for thought, the Arab
spurred forward toward the head of the column.

Jane Clayton could not know how much of Mohammed Beyd's indictment
might be true, or how much false; but at least it had the effect of
dampening her hopes and causing her to review with suspicion every past
act of the man upon whom she had been looking as her sole protector in
the midst of a world of enemies and dangers.

On the march a separate tent had been provided for the captive, and at
night it was pitched between those of Mohammed Beyd and Werper. A
sentry was posted at the front and another at the back, and with these
precautions it had not been thought necessary to confine the prisoner
to bonds. The evening following her interview with Mohammed Beyd, Jane
Clayton sat for some time at the opening of her tent watching the rough
activities of the camp. She had eaten the meal that had been brought
her by Mohammed Beyd's Negro slave--a meal of cassava cakes and a
nondescript stew in which a new-killed monkey, a couple of squirrels
and the remains of a zebra, slain the previous day, were impartially
and unsavorily combined; but the one-time Baltimore belle had long
since submerged in the stern battle for existence, an estheticism which
formerly revolted at much slighter provocation.

As the girl's eyes wandered across the trampled jungle clearing,
already squalid from the presence of man, she no longer apprehended
either the nearer objects of the foreground, the uncouth men laughing
or quarreling among themselves, or the jungle beyond, which
circumscribed the extreme range of her material vision. Her gaze
passed through all these, unseeing, to center itself upon a distant
bungalow and scenes of happy security which brought to her eyes tears
of mingled joy and sorrow. She saw a tall, broad-shouldered man riding
in from distant fields; she saw herself waiting to greet him with an
armful of fresh-cut roses from the bushes which flanked the little
rustic gate before her. All this was gone, vanished into the past,
wiped out by the torches and bullets and hatred of these hideous and
degenerate men. With a stifled sob, and a little shudder, Jane Clayton
turned back