e running to the scene, and on hearing the details of
the ambush ordered the men to follow him, and plunged into the tangled
vegetation.

In an instant they were in a hand-to-hand fight with some fifty black
warriors of Mbonga's village. Arrows and bullets flew thick and fast.

Queer African knives and French gun butts mingled for a moment in
savage and bloody duels, but soon the natives fled into the jungle,
leaving the Frenchmen to count their losses.

Four of the twenty were dead, a dozen others were wounded, and
Lieutenant D'Arnot was missing. Night was falling rapidly, and their
predicament was rendered doubly worse when they could not even find the
elephant trail which they had been following.

There was but one thing to do, make camp where they were until
daylight. Lieutenant Charpentier ordered a clearing made and a
circular abatis of underbrush constructed about the camp.

This work was not completed until long after dark, the men building a
huge fire in the center of the clearing to give them light to work by.

When all was safe as possible against attack of wild beasts and savage
men, Lieutenant Charpentier placed sentries about the little camp and
the tired and hungry men threw themselves upon the ground to sleep.

The groans of the wounded, mingled with the roaring and growling of the
great beasts which the noise and firelight had attracted, kept sleep,
except in its most fitful form, from the tired eyes. It was a sad and
hungry party that lay through the long night praying for dawn.

The blacks who had seized D'Arnot had not waited to participate in the
fight which followed, but instead had dragged their prisoner a little
way through the jungle and then struck the trail further on beyond the
scene of the fighting in which their fellows were engaged.

They hurried him along, the sounds of battle growing fainter and
fainter as they drew away from the contestants until there suddenly
broke upon D'Arnot's vision a good-sized clearing at one end of which
stood a thatched and palisaded village.

It was now dusk, but the watchers at the gate saw the approaching trio
and distinguished one as a prisoner ere they reached the portals.

A cry went up within the palisade. A great throng of women and
children rushed out to meet the party.

And then began for the French officer the most terrifying experience
which man can encounter upon earth--the reception of a white prisoner
into a village of African