cannot kill you"--this in the most
natural and dulcet voice, as if the desire to do so were a matter of
course.

"You would give the world to ask me a few questions," he went on, after
a pause; "but you are too proud to do it. Never mind, I'll tell you one
or two things, because I want your fellow white men to know them when
you go back--if you are lucky enough to get back. About that cursed
stone of yours, for instance. These negroes, or at least so the legend
goes, were Mahometans originally. While Mahomet himself was still alive,
there was a schism among his followers, and the smaller party moved away
from Arabia, and eventually crossed Africa. They took away with them, in
their exile, a valuable relic of their old faith in the shape of a large
piece of the black stone of Mecca. The stone was a meteoric one, as you
may have heard, and in its fall upon the earth it broke into two pieces.
One of these pieces is still at Mecca. The larger piece was carried away
to Barbary, where a skilful worker modelled it into the fashion which
you saw to-day. These men are the descendants of the original seceders
from Mahomet, and they have brought their relic safely through all their
wanderings until they settled in this strange place, where the desert
protects them from their enemies."

"And the ear?" I asked, almost involuntarily.

"Oh, that was the same story over again. Some of the tribe wandered away
to the south a few hundred years ago, and one of them, wishing to have
good luck for the enterprise, got into the temple at night and carried
off one of the ears. There has been a tradition among the negroes ever
since that the ear would come back some day. The fellow who carried
it was caught by some slaver, no doubt, and that was how it got
into America, and so into your hands--and you have had the honour of
fulfilling the prophecy."

He paused for a few minutes, resting his head upon his hands, waiting
apparently for me to speak. When he looked up again, the whole
expression of his face had changed. His features were firm and set, and
he changed the air of half levity with which he had spoken before for
one of sternness and almost ferocity.

"I wish you to carry a message back," he said, "to the white race,
the great dominating race whom I hate and defy. Tell them that I have
battened on their blood for twenty years, that I have slain them
until even I became tired of what had once been a joy, that I did this
unnoticed and