At that instant, as the chief executioner strode forward and held his dripping blade uplifted, ready to strike, the King raised his hand to command silence, and the hideously-dressed official paused in wonder, his sword poised in air. Betea, the Ocra, bending low, was whispering to the King, when the latter suddenly took the nut from his mouth and said: "So it is upon Omar, son of my enemy the Naya of Mo, that my eyes rest! Let him stand forth with his white companion." Obedient to the command of the King, the executioners allowed Omar to rise, and in a few moments we both stood before the royal stool. "How came you here?" asked Prempeh, scowling. "I was captured and sold as slave to the Arab dealers," he answered, drawing himself up with that princely air he always assumed in moments of danger. "And your white companion? How is it he is in our capital?" "I have been to the land of the white men across the sea, and he returned as my friend," Omar replied. "We were travelling homeward to Mo when by treachery I was entrapped." "By whom?" "By Samory." Across Prempeh's evil face there spread a sickly smile. He was an ally of the great Mohammedan chief, and saw at once that Samory had sold the son of their mutual enemy into slavery. "Your queen-mother," he said, "has times without number sent her armed hordes over the border to raid our villages, and it is the fetish that has delivered you, her son, into our hands. The fetish has not sent you hither as a sacrifice, but as a hostage. Therefore your life shall be spared together with that of your white friend, but you shall both be given as slaves to our trusted Ocra Betea. Let the sacrifice proceed. Prempeh, King of all the Ashantis, has spoken." Next second a poor black wretch was dragged along in Omar's place and the sword fell heavily upon him, while we were both hurried away in charge of a caboocer to the residence of the man who was, according to Omar, one of his mother's bitterest foes. Glad were we to escape with our lives from that awful scene of inhuman butchery, but it seemed that as slaves of this court favourite to whom we had been given, there would be but little brightness in our lives. As day succeeded day our gloomy forebodings were only too truly realized. Betea, the most powerful of the King's Ocras, seemed to delight in making our lives a burden to us, for amid luxurious surroundings we were beaten, starved, and ill-treated, until even death under the executioner's knife seemed a preferable fate.