IPB-176 The Missionary's Daughter by Author Unknown


Chapter 1


Her father was a missionary stationed here in Senegal, and Julie gave 
her faith all the belief and obedience she could. Yet sometimes as she 
stared at the fringe of trees around the house in which they lived and 
tried to imagine how deep was the jungle beyond those trees, she could 
not help wondering about the strange gods who inhabited the shadows 
there. Her father was busily preaching against something, and he 
referred to that something as the pagan gods of the people, so there 
was something, all right, she reasoned. Yet the people to whom he 
preached never mentioned any names or rival deities. Daranje Kawat she 
had heard of, but that was the name of their king. Daranje Kawat her 
father said, was jealous of God and therefore, against the preaching 
the Reverend Davenport did. There were times when Julie Davenport 
entertained some very pagan suspicions, like the one that King Daranje 
Kawat really had a right to his kingdom and that maybe the Davenport's 
strange white God ought to stick to his own territory, but she supposed 
such thoughts emanated from the jungle, a way the mysterious pagan gods 
had of fighting back.

So in a way, it was no surprise to Julie when one night a coarse 
snicker broke through the darkness of her room and a coarse hand 
covered her mouth. The pagan gods had come. She was half asleep, which 
accounted for her superstitious thoughts. But she was also half awake, 
which accounted for the fact that her curiosity overcame her terror, at 
first. Her startled eyes stared into the face of a black man who looked 
vaguely familiar, but it was too dark in the bedroom to see well. He 
was not alone and easily spirited her out of the room, out of the 
house, and through the jungle before she could become aware that it was 
really happening. They gagged her mouth but seemed to know there was no 
point in blindfolding her. After all, if she did manage to escape from 
them, it would have been suicide to try to find her way back along 
paths with which they were apparently familiar, but which she certainly 
could never find.

After her first hazy reaction, Julie was, of course, terrified. Her 
body went utterly limp and she may have passed out. There was no way 
for her to tell. It was as dark when she was unconscious, if she was, 
as it was when she was awake. There was no seeing the stars from in the 
jungle. The branches and foliage and leaves were far too thick. Her 
captors moved with the stealth of big cats, and she couldn't even count 
them until suddenly they came upon a little clearing and a road she 
didn't recognize. Then as they bundled her into the oldest automobile 
she had ever seen in her life, she saw for the first time that there 
were four of them and that every last one of them was a member of her 
father's congregation!


End of Page 1. See ipb-176.txt for full story.