"Men of the Makolo, ye have heard the questions that I have put to these
two men, and the answers that they have given to those questions. They
have acknowledged that the charges brought against them are true. They
have taken many lives, doomed many to die in lingering torment for the
mere gratification of their own personal enmity and their love of
cruelty. Out of their own mouths are they judged and condemned; they
have misused their power, and therefore is it taken from them. They
have wantonly taken the lives of others, therefore are their own lives
forfeit. The sentence passed upon them is that they die a shameful and
ignominious death. Take them, therefore, fasten strong ropes about
their necks, and hang them both from the great branch of yonder tree
until they be dead."
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.