For a long time Obergatz had held her in a native village,
the chief of which was still under the domination of his fear
of the ruthless German oppressors. While here only hardships and
discomforts assailed her, Obergatz himself being held in leash by
the orders of his distant superior but as time went on the life in
the village grew to be a veritable hell of cruelties and oppressions
practiced by the arrogant Prussian upon the villagers and the members
of his native command--for time hung heavily upon the hands of the
lieutenant and with idleness combining with the personal discomforts
he was compelled to endure, his none too agreeable temper found
an outlet first in petty interference with the chiefs and later in
the practice of absolute cruelties upon them.
What the self-sufficient German could not see was plain to Jane
Clayton--that the sympathies of Obergatz' native soldiers lay with
the villagers and that all were so heartily sickened by his abuse
that it needed now but the slightest spark to detonate the mine
of revenge and hatred that the pig-headed Hun had been assiduously
fabricating beneath his own person.
And at last it came, but from an unexpected source in the form of
a German native deserter from the theater of war. Footsore, weary,
and spent, he dragged himself into the village late one afternoon,
and before Obergatz was even aware of his presence the whole
village knew that the power of Germany in Africa was at an end.
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