. "We must spill no
blood!" they repeated, looking aghast at one another. "Hear what the King
says! We must not cut the victim's throat. We must bind a child with
cords and roast it alive for him!"

Felix hardly knew what to do or say at this atrocious proposal. "If you
roast it alive," he cried, "you deserve to be all scorched up with
lightning. Take care what you do! Spare the child's life! I will have no
victim. Beware how you anger me!"

But the savage no sooner says than he does. With him deliberation is
unknown, and impulse everything. In a moment the natives had gathered in
a circle a little way off, and began drawing lots. Several children,
seized hurriedly up among the crowd, were huddled like so many sheep in
the centre. Felix looked on from his enclosure, half petrified with
horror. The lot fell upon a pretty little girl of five years old. Without
one word of warning, without one sign of remorse, before Felix's very
eyes, they began to bind the struggling and terrified child just outside
the circle.

The white man could stand this horrid barbarity no longer. At the risk of
his life--at the risk of Muriel's--he must rush out to prevent them. They
should never dare to kill that helpless child before his very eyes. Come
what might--though even Muriel should suffer for it--he felt he _must_
rescue that trembling little creature. Drawing his trusty knife, and
opening the big blade ostentatiously before their eyes, he made a sudden
dart like a wild beast across the line, and pounced down upon the party
that guarded the victim.

Was it a ruse to make him cross the line, alone, or did they really mean
it? He hardly knew; but he had no time to debate the abstract question.
Bursting into their midst, he seized the child with a rush in his
circling arms, and tried to hurry back with it within the protecting
taboo-line.

Quick as lightning he was surrounded and almost cut down by a furious and
frantic mob of half-naked savages. "Kill him! Tear him to pieces!" they
cried in their rage. "He has a bad heart! He destroyed our huts! He broke
down our plantations! Kill him, kill him, kill him!"

As they closed in upon him, with spears and tomahawks and clubs, Felix
saw he had nothing left for it now but a hard fight for life to return to
the taboo-line. Holding the child in one arm, and striking wildly out
with his knife with the other, he tried to hack his way back by main
force to the shelter of the taboo-line in fran