not repeat the rude verses to which the endless thumping of the drums lent an added, albeit unconscious, mockery. Then a public epileptic fit on the part of an unpopular village elder changed the tune, or rather the theme, for tunes on a drum can vary little, and the memory of Baban Miji became part of the unrecorded and little remembered past. But the traders in antimony and salt and onions throve without intermission, since a performance was rare indeed that had power to draw men from the selling booths as Baban Miji's had done.

II.

one

Headquarters was notoriously of the hottest stations in the country. Walford, the adjutant, sweltering in the orderly-room after a hard morning's work, wondered for the hundredth time whether the desire-for reasons of defence-to be partially surrounded by water justified the setting of the capital in a basin where mosquitoes swarmed and the percentage of malarial patients exceeded that of any other place between the Niger and Lake Chad.

"Anything else, Sergeant-Major?" he asked, raising his arms from the soaked blotting-pad in front of him.

"Only two recruits to attest, sir."
"Bring them in."

Two natives shambled into the office. Tattered strips of dirty cloth covered inadequately their thin bodies, and not at all their limbs. Walford eyed them over, glancing at the slip of paper which recorded the result of the doctor's preliminary examination. He spoke to one of them in the vernacular.

"You have crawcraw," he said.

"Ah so," said the man meekly, "the sores will heal." He touched them reflectively with his finger. "Moreover, I shall take medicine."

"Well, we can't have you like that,"

said Walford decisively. "Go and take your medicine, and then come back, and perhaps you may become a soldier."

The applicant retired unaffronted. The white man's remarks had not been nearly so personal as the crude criticisms of his friends. The second man passed muster.

"What is your name?" Walford asked, tearing off a printed form. "My name is-Musa." Walford began to write. "From what town?" "From the town of Kano." "Musa Kano," repeated "2163 Private Musa Kano." "Occupation.

have you done?"

Walford;

What kind of work

"Just work," replied the new recruit.

"Juggins!" said Walford, relapsing into homely English, "what kind of work?"

The other considered. "The work of tilling," he said at length. "Laborer," wrote Walford in the allotted space. "Age?"

"It is twenty-eight years since I was born."

"Twenty-eight? Why, you are only

a boy!"

"Twenty-eight," the man repeated. "Twenty-eight, by Allah."

"I say you are only a boy. You're about twenty."

Walford forgot that the native's year is a sowing and a harvest, a little over nine months.

Private Musa smiled assent. "Very well," he said, "it is twenty. Whatever you say is true. It is twenty and no more."

The next query concerned his race, and here was no difficulty. The Englishman's preference for the Hausa stock was common knowledge; besides which, had not his grandmother's sister borne a child to a pedlar of that nation? Walford wrote "Hausa" as

dictated, and folded up the paper

form.

Sergeant

"Take him to barracks, Major," he said, rising and putting on his coat, "and give him his kit. He had better go to 'C' Company. They're below strength, and will want all they can get if this expedition they talk of comes off. So you've got three months before he leaves in which to make a soldier of him."

Thus did Baban Miji-for he it was --solve the problem of livelihood and enter into a new and strenuous world, with no severer initiation than a catechism of five direct questions answered by him with five equally direct, albeit blameless, lies; and though he was made to do all sorts of extraordinary things, such as jumping repeatedly over a block of wood, and lying on his back with his feet in the air, and though it was very difficult always to be as punctual as the bugler (who was at once a marvel and a nuisance), and the rifle seemed at first a terribly complicated piece of machinery, with a malicious habit of kicking you in the shoulder if you did not in firing grasp it very firmly,still it was such an engrossing and prosperous time after weeks of roadtramping on a diet of dry yams wheedled from the charitable, that the day was never regretted on which the plunge had been taken, and he had walked into the dwellings of the white-skinned, all powerful over-lord who ruled the land. There was money; there was clothing-and uncommonly gay clothing, too, all without holes. There was a warm hut to sleep in, with, at night, a fire inside, and there only remained one thing, to wit a wife, to complete his happiness. For this a final choice was necessary between two attractive alternatives. On the one hand, Ayesha was undeniably good-looking and young; on the other hand there was Fatima, who

was middle-aged and fat. But Fatima could cook. Ah! how she could cook! No one more generous in grease and gravy than she. In a month his mind was made up. Fatima it should be, and Ayesha would only get a beating if she quarrelled with an irrevocable decision.

In this way the three months passed quickly and happily enough. Not only did the sergeant-major commend him for smartness at drill, but Walford himself on two occasions addressed to him gracious words of encouragement before the whole squad of recruits on the barrack square, so that Baban Miji felt a tingling of pride thrill all down his back, and through his putties down to his bare and henna-stained feet. Among his fellow-soldiers, too, he soon gained popularity. The gifts which had proved so lucrative in days gone by could not remain entirely hidden, and it needed only an earnest solicitation to obtain from him a brief display, effected by the aid of nothing more complicated than a piece of cloth and some cowry shells, of those powers of legerdemain with which natural aptitude and diligent practice had combined to endow him. For these performances his hut would be open to all comers; but they were never given without a subsequent vague feeling of regret which, for his own peace of mind, he had no wish to encourage. The squad of recruits with whom he had drilled, some fifty strong, was at length officially pronounced as fit for "full duty," and its members were duly allocated to the various out-stations that required them. Baban Miji found himself one day, with some score of others of his own standing, on the northward road, a lanky corporal in charge to lead the way, and Fatima pattering tirelessly in the rear with a pagoda-like pile of dishes and calabashes delicately balanced on her head.

III.

Mortimer's days during the six months since he had reported himself at his new station had been very far from idle. There had been much to learn in the subtle differences of treatment suitable to the native soldier as compared to those with which he had been familiar in his own regiment in England. Fitzgerald, his company Commander, had spared no pains in helping him, and under his guidance he had soon acquired a proficiency in the language sufficient for all the practical purposes of every-day life. The Inspector-General had visited Ilo on his tour of inspection not long after Mortimer's arrival, and had expressed himself as well pleased with all that he had seen. Thereafter the standing possibility of active service at a few hours' notice had provided a stimulus to unceasing zeal which would have more than counteracted any tendency to take things easy, had such existed. Scarcely a month passed in which Henson, the Commissioner, did not receive abundant evidence that things were not right in the pagan territory which formed the western fringe of his district; and the report on this, the one part of the province euphemistically described as "not under full administrative control," formed the only unsatisfactory feature of his periodical letters to the Governor. succession of envoys, charged with messages of ever-increasing urgency. had been peremptorily denied an approach by these untamed tribes, and more than one had borne on his return bloody and tangible witness of their ferocity. Not a bundle of grain nor a skin of oil, the form of tribute in kind known to be the most appropriate from men rich in both commodities, could be extracted from them, and all attempts at a friendly settlement were frustrated by their obstinate refusal to emerge from the

Α

hilly strongholds in which they placed their trust. Tales of rapine and of sudden raids on the cattle and crops of their peaceful neighbors in the plain completed the ominous account of their deeds, awaiting settlement, but the overlord's patience was still unexhausted. An embassy headed by a native official high in the Commissioner's political entourage was despatched with instructions to exhaust the powers of cajolery in a final attempt to bring them to reason. A week later a single mutilated survivor of the deputation crawled to the Commissioner's door. His report was grimly brief. His companions had been surrounded, and those who had not been killed in flight by poisoned arrows had been seized and dragged off to inevitable torture and death. The cup was now officially judged to be full, and when the little party of twenty men from headquarters, filing across the stream that divided the native town of Ilo from the European establishment, had mounted the higher ground beyond, they found in progress all the evident signs that betoken the immediate conduct of an expedition. Mortimer had already left with twenty men, charged with the duties of collecting food at the wayside village of Marin Fassa. This place, distant sixty miles from Ilo, had been chosen as the base of operations, its position -close to, but on the near side of, the pagan territory marked for invasionmaking it obviously suitable for that purpose. Henson and Fitzgerald were to follow with the rest of the soldiers as soon as the necessary number of carriers had been collected. To Fitzgerald the arrival of a corporal and nineteen additional men, though not unexpected, was a welcome and timely reinforcement to his fighting force; for when every allowance had been made for superiority in weapons

Behind

side with the Commissioner. them came the Maxim gun, carried dismembered by three of the strongest carriers, the remainder of whom followed immediately in rear. Last in order came the remaining three sections of soldiers, seventy odd men, with Mortimer at the tail riding easily, but alert, with a fly-switch of horsehair jauntily balanced on his hip. In this order, and directed by the sole inhabitant of Marin Fassa who could be persuaded to confess even a hazy topographical knowledge of the country they were in, the expedition threaded its way onwards. They were now in the midst of a wide treeless plain. On the far western horizon loomed a great dim semicircle of hills, which their guide informed them marked the centre and capital of the pagan confederation.

"As for me," he said, halting and looking upwards to reply to the Commissioner's inquiries, "I have never reached the hills. It was the selling of salt that brought me here; the pagans lacked salt for many months, and I, who am exceedingly brave, carried salt to them here in the plain" he pointed to a spot a short distance ahead-"and received a skinful of oil in return. The price was small, but how should I dispute it, I alone and they so many, naked, and with spears and arrows every man? With speed I returned home. The skin is even now in my house, so that none may gainsay my daring."

The leading section was now thrown forward in skirmishing order, and Baban Miji, with rifle at the trail, pressed eagerly on, glancing every now and then towards Fitzgerald in anticipation of any fresh signal or word of command. The ring of hills grew nearer and larger, until every detail of stone and fissure was clearly visible to the eye. Flung without apparent plan over all the face of the rocky slopes was a vast multitude of bee-hive huts packed together in clumps of varying sizes, through which the path, growing ever more precipitous, wound circuitously before them till it disappeared over the horizon. The skirmishers fell once more into single file, reducing the distance between themselves and the rest of the column to about 100 yards. Through all the rocky heights not a sound was to be heard but their own regular footfalls, and the rhythmic beat of a hundred bayonet-scabbards rapping softly against a hundred thighs. The three Englishmen could have felt assured that this unexpected air of desertion betokened desertion itself but for one tell-tale sight. Through the thatched roofs of one or two huts a thin smoke coiled strugglingly into the air, the smoke of fires but recently extinguished, and even now not entirely out. When the high ground was reached which had formed their horizon while yet in the lower plain, the path was seen to slope gently downwards through a defile bordered on either side by a steep ascent of bare rock. Two parties of soldiers, led respectively by Fitzgerald and the native company sergeant-major, were deflected to either flank for the purpose of reconnoitring the high ground, while the remainder, under Mortimer, after waiting a few moments for the flanking parties to gain the heights, proceeded cautiously on their way