Dead! The word touched M'Bongwele and stirred him as could no other word in his own or any other language. He? Dead? And by the hands of others? How many of his unresisting subjects had he condemned to suffer death--the death of acute lingering, long-drawn-out, seemingly interminable suffering? And how he had laughed with ferocious glee when he had succeeded in making some of them--not many, only one or two occasionally--quail at the prospect of what lay before them! But he had never dreamed of a day when he himself should be doomed to suffer the ignominy of public execution. How should he? Was he not the king? and was his word not the law? Who should dare to raise a hand against him? The idea seemed to him preposterous, grotesque, an absurdity, until he glanced upward and saw those set, stern white faces gazing down upon him with eyes in which he read the truth that his doom was fixed, immutable, inexorable. Involuntarily he shuddered, and glanced wildly about him as though looking for a way of escape. Would his own people stand tamely by and see him, their king, perish at the word of these mysterious, terrible strangers? Or would a single one of them dare to lay sacrilegious hands upon him in obedience to the order of these strangers? With the half-formed hope that generations of iron discipline and unquestioning obedience to the king's will might yet avail to protect him in the moment of his utmost need, his glance searched face after face. In vain! He had allowed his tyranny to carry him so far that at length there was scarce a man among those present who could say with certainty that his own life would not be the next demanded to satisfy some savage whim of the king. There were not twenty among all those hundreds who would raise a hand to save him! Too late he saw the full depth of his rash, headstrong, criminal folly, and to what straits it had led him; and, suddenly snatching a spear from the hand of one of his astonished and unwary guards, he strove to drive its point into his own heart. But the owner of the spear recovered himself in a flash, and, seizing the blade of the weapon in his bare hand, he twisted it upward with such strength that the slender wooden shaft snapped, leaving the head in his hand and the innocuous shaft in that of M'Bongwele. At the same instant half a dozen men flung themselves upon the king, and in a trice his hands were drawn behind him, and securely bound. Then, from somewhere, two long thongs or ropes of twisted raw-hide were produced and quickly knotted round the necks of the two condemned men, and in a tense, breathless silence they were led away to the fatal tree. CHAPTER NINETEEN. THE KING'S NECKLACE. With the return of Lobelalatutu from his gruesome task, and while the bodies of M'Bongwele and M'Pusa still swung from the tree, the professor turned to his friends and said--