Kettle woke on the instant that he was touched, and started to struggle for his life, as indeed he had struggled many a time before.  But the numbers of the blacks put effective resistance out of the question.  Four of them pressed down each arm on to the bed, four each leg, three pressed on his head.  Their animal faces champed and gibbered at him; the animal smell of them made him splutter and cough.

Captain Kettle was not a man who often sought help from others; he was used to playing a lone-handed fight against a mob; but the suddenness of the attack, the loneliness of his surroundings, and the dejection due to his recent dose of fever, for the first instant almost unnerved him, and on the first alarm he sang out lustily for the missionary’s help.  There was no answer.  With a jerk he turned his head, and saw that the other bed was empty.  The man had left the hut.

For a time the captive did not actively resist further.  In a climate like that of the Congo one’s store of physical strength is limited, and he did not wish to earn unnecessarily severe bonds by wasting it.  As it was, he was tied up cruelly enough with grass rope, and then taken from the hut and flung down under the blazing sunshine outside.

Presently a fantastic form danced up from behind one of the huts, daubed with colored clays, figged out with a thousand tawdry charms, and cinctured round the middle by a girdle of half-picked bones.  He wafted an evil odor before him as he advanced, and he came up and stood with one foot on Kettle’s breast in the attitude of a conqueror.

This was the witch-doctor, a creature who held power of life and death over all the village, whom the villagers suffered to test them with poison, to put them to unnamable tortures, to rob them as he pleased,—­to be, in fact, a kind of insane autocrat working any whim that seized him freely in their midst.  The witch-doctor’s power of late had suffered.  The white man Nilssen had “put bigger ju-ju” on him, and under its influence had despoiled him of valuable property.  Now was his moment of counter triumph.  The witch-doctor stated that he brought this other white man to the village by the power of his spells; and the villagers believed him.  There was the white man lying on the ground before them to prove it.

Remained next to see what the witch-doctor would do with his captive.

The man himself was evidently at a loss, and talked, and danced, and screamed, and foamed, merely to gain time.  He spoke nothing but Fiote, and of that tongue Kettle knew barely a single word.  But presently the canoe-man with the yaws was dragged up, and, in his own phrase, was bidden to act as “linguister.”

“He say,” translated the man with the yaws, “if dem big ju-ju lib back for here, he let you go.”

“And if not?”

[Illustration:  HE CAME AND STOOD WITH ONE FOOT ON KETTLE’S BREAST IN THE ATTITUDE OF A CONQUEROR.]