h, his dose of fever, his previous night of
wakefulness in the canoe, all combined to undermine his guard; and,
moreover, the attack of the savages was stealthy in the extreme. Like
ghosts, they must have crept back from the bush to reconnoitre their
village; like daylight ghosts, they must have surrounded the trader
missionary's hut and peered at the sleeping man between the bamboos of
the wall, and then made their entrance; and it must have been with the
quickness of wild beasts that they made their spring.

Kettle woke on the instant that he was touched, and started to struggle
for his life, as indeed he had struggled many a time before. But the
numbers of the blacks put effective resistance out of the question. Four
of them pressed down each arm on to the bed, four each leg, three
pressed on his head. Their animal faces champed and gibbered at him; the
animal smell of them made him splutter and cough.

Captain Kettle was not a man who often sought help from others; he was
used to playing a lone-handed fight against a mob; but the suddenness of
the attack, the loneliness of his surroundings, and the dejection due to
his recent dose of fever, for the first instant almost unnerved him, and
on the first alarm he sang out lustily for the missionary's help. There
was no answer. With a jerk he turned his head, and saw that the other
bed was empty. The man had left the hut.

For a time the captive did not actively resist further. In a climate
like that of the Congo one's store of physical strength is limited, and
he did not wish to earn unnecessarily severe bonds by wasting it. As it
was, he was tied up cruelly enough with grass rope, and then taken from
the hut and flung down under the blazing sunshine outside.

Presently a fantastic form danced up from behind one of the huts,
daubed with colored clays, figged out with a thousand tawdry charms, and
cinctured round the middle by a girdle of half-picked bones. He wafted
an evil odor before him as he advanced, and he came up and stood with
one foot on Kettle's breast in the attitude of a conqueror.

This was the witch-doctor, a creature who held power of life and death
over all the village, whom the villagers suffered to test them with
poison, to put them to unnamable tortures, to rob them as he
pleased,--to be, in fact, a kind of insane autocrat working any whim
that seized him freely in their midst. The witch-doctor's power of late
had suffered. The white man Nilssen ha