mpressed into the service of Kultur and upon
their poor, bruised bodies Kultur's brand was revealed in divers
cruel wounds and bruises.

Thus even in darkest Africa was the light of German civilization
commencing to reflect itself upon the undeserving natives just as
at the same period, the fall of 1914, it was shedding its glorious
effulgence upon benighted Belgium.

It is true that the guides had led the party astray; but this is
the way of most African guides. Nor did it matter that ignorance
rather than evil intent had been the cause of their failure. It
was enough for Hauptmann Fritz Schneider to know that he was lost
in the African wilderness and that he had at hand human beings less
powerful than he who could be made to suffer by torture. That he
did not kill them outright was partially due to a faint hope that
they might eventually prove the means of extricating him from his
difficulties and partially that so long as they lived they might
still be made to suffer.

The poor creatures, hoping that chance might lead them at last
upon the right trail, insisted that they knew the way and so led
on through a dismal forest along a winding game trail trodden deep
by the feet of countless generations of the savage denizens of the
jungle.

Here Tantor, the elephant, took his long way from dust wallow to
water. Here Buto, the rhinoceros, blundered blindly in his solitary
majesty, while by night the great cats paced silently upon their
padded feet beneath the dense canopy of overreaching trees toward
the broad plain beyond, where they found their best hunting.

It was at the edge of this plain which came suddenly and unexpectedly
before the eyes of the guides that their sad hearts beat with
renewed hope. Here the hauptmann drew a deep sigh of relief, for
after days of hopeless wandering through almost impenetrable jungle
the broad vista of waving grasses dotted here and there with open
park like woods and in the far distance the winding line of green
shrubbery that denoted a river appeared to the European a veritable
heaven.

The Hun smiled in his relief, passed a cheery word with his lieutenant,
and then scanned the broad plain with his field glasses. Back and
forth they swept across the rolling land until at last they came
to rest upon a point near the center of the landscape and close to
the green-fringed contours of the river.

"We are in luck," said Schneider to his companions. "Do you see
it?"

The lieu