t
night by a jaguar."

The traveller, left alone, lay still in the hut, and his thoughts
wandered backwards. He looked out over the bare, scrubby stretch of
land which had been cleared for this encampment to the mass of bush and
flowering shrubs beyond, mysterious and impenetrable save for that rough
elephant track along which he had travelled; to the broad-bosomed river,
blue as the sky above, and to the mountains fading into mist beyond.
The face of his host had carried him back into the past. Puzzled
reminiscence tugged at the strings of memory. It came to him later on
at dinner time, when they three, the Commandant, the doctor and himself,
sat at a little table arranged just outside the hut, that they might
catch the faint breeze from the mountains, herald of the swift-falling
darkness. Native servants beat the air around them with bamboo fans to
keep off the insects, and the air was faint almost to noxiousness with
the perfume of some sickly, exotic shrub.

"Why, you're Devinter!" he exclaimed suddenly,--"Sigismund Devinter! You
were at Eton with me--Horrock's House--semi-final in the racquets."

"And Magdalen afterwards, number five in the boat."

"And why the devil did the doctor here tell me that your name was Von
Ragastein?"

"Because it happens to be the truth," was the somewhat measured reply.
"Devinter is my family name, and the one by which I was known when in
England. When I succeeded to the barony and estates at my uncle's death,
however, I was compelled to also take the title."

"Well, it's a small world!" Dominey exclaimed. "What brought you out
here really--lions or elephants?"

"Neither."

"You mean to say that you've taken up this sort of political business
just for its own sake, not for sport?"

"Entirely so. I do not use a sporting rifle once a month, except for
necessity. I came to Africa for different reasons."

Dominey drank deep of his hock and seltzer and leaned back, watching the
fireflies rise above the tall-bladed grass, above the stumpy clumps of
shrub, and hang like miniature stars in the clear, violet air.

"What a world!" he soliloquised. "Siggy Devinter, Baron Von Ragastein,
out here, slaving for God knows what, drilling niggers to fight God
knows whom, a political machine, I suppose, future Governor-General of
German Africa, eh? You were always proud of your country, Devinter."

"My country is a country to be proud of," was the solemn reply.

"Well, you're in earnest,