led
and blown up into a red, roaring flame. The while, thongs had been
thrown over the limb of a tree. Their time had come.

Mushad, with two or three others, now approached them.

"What was my promise to you, ye swine?" he began. "Was it not that ye
should hang by the heels, that your eyes should be scooped out, and live
coals placed in the sockets? Behold. The preparations are even now
being made. How like ye them?"

"We like them not at all, O chief," answered Haviland, desperate. "See,
now, you are a brave man, and we have fought you fair and you have
conquered. We expect death, but we English are not accustomed to
torture. Put us therefore to a swift death."

"Ha! Now ye cry for mercy, but before you laughed! It is well,"
answered Mushad. "Yet ye shall not obtain it. What of all my fighting
men ye have slain, also many of my slaves?" And, turning, he beckoned
to four savage-looking negroes. "Him first," pointing to Haviland.

He was as powerless to move as a log. They seized him by the neck and
dragged him towards one of the trees whereon a noose dangled. Their
knives were drawn, and as they dragged him along he could see another
ruffian kneeling by the fire, extracting a great glowing ember with a
pair of rude tongs. Utterly powerless to struggle in his bonds, he felt
the noose tightened round his ankles; then he was hauled up, swinging
head downwards from the bough. His head was bursting with the rush of
blood to it, and yet with his starting eyes he could see the fiend-like
forms of his black torturers standing by him with the knife, and the red
glowing embers.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE.

THE INSWANI.

The hot night air brooded steamy and close upon the slumbering camp of
the slavers, but to these it mattered nothing. Ferocious Arab and
bloodthirsty negro alike were plunged in calm and peaceful slumber.

Not so the unhappy captives. To the tortures of their cramping bonds
and the bites of innumerable insects from which they were entirely
powerless to protect themselves, were added those of anticipation. With
a refinement of cruelty which was thoroughly Oriental, the slaver chief
had decreed a respite. He had caused his victims to undergo in
imagination the horrible torments he intended should be their lot on the
morrow, and, to this end, he had ordered them to be taken down from the
tree and put back as they were before, so that they might have the whole
night through to meditat