white helmet, and his
clenched fists burst the white cotton gloves. He half-drew his
saber--thought better of that, and returned it. There was an askari
standing near with kiboko in hand to drive back the crowd should any
press too closely. He snatched the whip and struck the condemned man
with it, as high up as he could reach, making a great welt across his
bare stomach. The man neither winced nor complained.

"For those words," the commandant screamed at him in German, "you shall
not die in comfort! For that insolence, mere hanging is too good!"

Then he calmed himself a little, and repeated the words in the native
tongue, explaining to the crowd that German dignity should be upheld at
all costs.

"Fetch him down from there," he ordered.

Schubert sprang on the table and knocked the condemned man off it with
a blow of his fist. With hands bound behind him the poor fellow had no
power of balance, and though he jumped clear he fell face-downward,
skinning his cheek on the gravel. The commandant promptly put a foot
on his neck and pinned him down.

"Flog him!" he ordered. "Two hundred lashes!"

It was done in silence, except for the corporal's labored breathing and
the commandant's incessant sharp commands to beat
harder--harder--harder. A sergeant stood by counting. The crack of
the whip divided up the silence into periods of agony.

When the count was done the victim was still conscious. Schubert and a
sergeant dragged him to his feet, and hauled him to the table. Four
other men--two sergeants and two natives--passed a rope round the table
legs. Schubert lifted the victim by the elbows so that his head could
pass through the noose, and when that was accomplished the man had to
stand on tiptoe on the soap-box in order to breathe at all.

"All ready!" announced Schubert, and jumped off with a laugh, his white
tunic bloody from contact with the victim's tortured back.

"Los!" roared the commandant

The men hauled on the rope. Table and soap-box came tumbling away, and
the victim spun in the air on nothing, spinning round, and round, and
round--slower and slower and slower--then back the other way round
faster and faster.

They say hanging is a merciful death--that the pressure of rope on two
arteries produces anesthesia, but few are reported to have come back to
tell of the experience. At any rate, as is not the case with shooting,
it is easy to know when the victim is really dead.

For second