Thus they moved in silence between the verdure-clad banks of the
little river through which the waters of Jad-ben-lul emptied--now
in the moonlight, now in dense shadow where great trees overhung
the stream, and at last out upon the waters of another lake, the
black shores of which seemed far away under the weird influence of
a moonlight night.
Jane Clayton sat alert in the stern of the last canoe. For months
she had been under constant surveillance, the prisoner first of one
ruthless race and now the prisoner of another. Since the long-gone
day that Hauptmann Fritz Schneider and his band of native German
troops had treacherously wrought the Kaiser's work of rapine
and destruction on the Greystoke bungalow and carried her away to
captivity she had not drawn a free breath. That she had survived
unharmed the countless dangers through which she had passed
she attributed solely to the beneficence of a kind and watchful
Providence.
At first she had been held on the orders of the German High Command
with a view of her ultimate value as a hostage and during these
months she had been subjected to neither hardship nor oppression,
but when the Germans had become hard pressed toward the close of
their unsuccessful campaign in East Africa it had been determined
to take her further into the interior and now there was an element
of revenge in their motives, since it must have been apparent that
she could no longer be of any possible military value.
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