of their tears.

This instinct for the truth of things made her a reader of people. Adams
had interested her at first sight, because she found him difficult to
read. She had never met a man like him before; he belonged to a different
race. The man in him appealed powerfully to the woman in her; they were
physical affinities. She had told him this in a hundred ways half
unconsciously and without speech before they parted at Marseilles, but the
mind in him had not appealed to the mind in her. She did not know his
mind, its stature or its bent, and until that knowledge came to her she
could not love him.

As he stood with his back to the fireplace after that pronouncement on the
spiritual and moral condition of the Zappo Zap, his thoughts strayed for a
moment with a waft of the wing right across the world to the camping place
by the great tree. Out there now, under the stars, the tree and the pool
were lying just as he had seen them last. Away to the east the burst
elephant gun was resting just where it had been dropped; the bones of the
giraffe, clean-picked and white, were lying just where the gun had laid
them; and the bones of the man who had held the gun were lying just where
the leopards had left him.

Adams knew nothing of this triangle drawn by death; he still fancied the
Zappo Zap alive and deadly. Stirred into speech by that thought he went
on:

"A cannibal--a creature worse than a tiger--that was the being for whom
your father risked his life."

"A cannibal?" said Maxine, opening her eyes wide.

"Yes; a soldier of the Government who was detailed to act as our guide."

"A soldier--but what Government employs cannibals as soldiers?"

"Oh," said Adams, "they call them soldiers, that is just a name. Slave
drivers is the real name, but the Government that employs them does not
use the word slave--oh, no, everyone would be shocked--_scoundrels_!"

He spoke the word with suddenly flashing eyes, uplifted head, and a face
as stern the face of Themis. He seemed for a moment fronting some
invisible foe, then, smothering his wrath, he went on:

"I lose control of myself when I think of what I have seen--the suffering,
the misery, and the wretchedness. I saw enough at first to have made me
open my eyes, but the thing was not shown to me really till I saw the
bones of murdered people--people whom I had seen walking about
alive--lying there a few weeks later, just skeletons; a little child I had
talked to and played