They placed him between two soldiers before me at the foot of the terrace steps above which my throne had been set, and I was about to speak and greet him kindly, when his anger already got the better of him, and, with a mocking smile on his lips, he said in a loud, rough voice that was most unlike his own quiet, even tones,—

'Well, your Majesty, as I suppose you think yourself for the present, I expected something like this—to be brought out into the midst of your fellow-savages and sentenced like a felon before my own sister and the woman who, like yourself, owes her life to me!'

Then he laughed one of his strange, joyless laughs, and went on before I could reply,—

'Well, I suppose I mustn't grumble. You have won, and to the victor go the spoils. Now that you have apparently bought the girl who was once my sister with your gold, and I have given you your own sister-wife back, you will be able to try an interesting experiment in your old form of matrimony—'

I saw Joyful Star shrink back in her seat and turn her head away from him with a little cry as he said these evil words, and they angered me so, that—forgetting they were spoken by a man who stood helpless before me—I cried,—

'Silence, liar and speaker of evil! or your next words shall be the last that human ears shall hear you speak. Are you still mad, or have you forgotten that you were once a man?'

He smiled such a smile as you may have seen on the lips of one who has died in agony, and said with a swift change in his voice,—

'I beg your Majesty's pardon, and—and the ladies' too. It was a most ungentlemanly thing to say, and one should not forget one's manners on the threshold of the next world—if there is one. But come, your Majesty, you are wasting your valuable time, and keeping all these interesting savages of yours waiting. You'll find I shall take it quietly enough. What do you propose that it shall be—something with boiling oil or red-hot pincers in it?'

I knew that a man who could speak thus, believing that he was about to die, must be in a pitiful plight, and so I answered him sternly, and yet without anger,—

'Laurens Djama, I have not brought you here to jest with you, nor yet, as you think, to condemn you to die, though your life is justly forfeit to me and my people, whom you would have betrayed again to their oppressors. Now, listen! You brought me back from death to life, and for my life I will give you yours, and for Golden Star's I will pay you the price agreed on and something more. It was by my foolish act that the madness of the gold-hunger came upon you, and for that I will give you your freedom; but not now, for that would not be safe for me or my people, since you have betrayed us once, and, knowing what you do, might do so again. You shall be taken hence to a pleasant and fertile valley, where you shall have all freedom, save permission to leave it until this war is over and I am undisputed lord of the land of my fathers. Then you shall take the wealth that shall be yours and go to your own country, or wherever you please, so long as you do not remain in mine, for here there is no place for you, since my people do not forgive as easily as I do. Now I have spoken; if there is anything more that you can ask, and I can give with safety, ask it.'