An easy prey had the little town upon the flat-topped hill, set in the middle of a basin, proved to the Boer General and his commandos but for one thing. For weeks after the bursting of the first shell over Gueldersdorp three sides of the beleaguered town were so many open doors for the enemy. Only upon the threshold of each door stood Fear, and guarded and held the citadel.
III
That hard taskmaster, Satan, is sometimes wonderfully indulgent to those who serve him well. While Bough, the keeper of the tavern, was yet turning about the open letter in his thick, short, hairy hands, weighing the chances attending the sending of it against the chances of keeping it back, the woman who served as mistress of the place thrust her coarsely-waved head of yellow bleached hair and rouge-ruddled face in at the room door, and called to him:
"Boss, the sick toff is doing a croak. Giving up the ghost for all he's worth – he is. Better come and take a look for yourself if you don't believe me."
Bough swore with relief and surprise, delayed only to lock away the letter, and went to take a look. It was as he hoped, a real stroke of luck for a man who knew how to work it.
Richard Mildare – for Bough knew now what had been the name of the Englishman: Captain the Hon. Richard Mildare, late of the Grey Hussars – was dead. No hand made murderous by the lust of gold had helped him to his death. Sudden failure of the heart is common in aggravated cases of rheumatic fever, and with one suffocating struggle, one brief final pang, he had gone to join her he loved. But his dead face did not look at rest. There was some reflection in it of the terror that had come upon him in the watches of that last night.
Bough stayed some time alone in the room of death. When he came out he was extremely affable and gentle. The woman, who knew him, chuckled to herself when he met the Kaffir serving-maid bringing back the child from an airing in the sun, and told her to take it to the mistress. Then he went into the bar-room to speak to the Englishman's Boer driver.
Leaning easily upon the zinc-covered counter he spoke to the man in the Taal, with which he was perfectly familiar:
"Your Baas has gone in, as my wife and I expected."
Smoots Beste growled in his throat:
"He was no Baas of mine, the verdoemte rooinek! I drove for him for pay, that is all. There is wage owing me still, for the matter of that – and where am I to get it now that the heathen has gone to the burning?"
Smoots, who was all of a heathen himself, and regularly got drunk, not only on week days, but on Sabbaths, felt virtuously certain that the Englishman had gone to Hell.
Bough smiled and poured out a four-finger swig of bad Cape brandy, and pushed it across the counter.
"You shall get the money, every tikkie. Only listen to me."
Smoots Beste tossed off the fiery liquid, and returned in a tone less surly:
"I am listening, Baas."
Said Bough, speaking with the thickish lisp and slurring of the consonants that distinguished his utterance when he sought to appear more simple and candid than usual:
"This dead toff, with his flash waggon and fine team, and Winchester repeating-rifles, had very little money. He has died in my debt for the room and the nursing, and the good nourishment, for which I trusted him all these three weeks, and I am a poor man. The dollars I have paid you and the Kaffir and the Cape boys on his account came out of my own pocket. Rotten soft have I behaved over him, that's the God's truth, and when I shall get back my own there's no knowing. But, of course, I shall act square."
The Boer's thick lips parted in a grin, showing his dirty, greenish-yellow teeth. He scratched his shaggy head, and said, his tongue lubricated to incautiousness by the potent liquor:
"The waggons, and the oxen, and the guns and ammunition, and the stores in the second waggon are worth good money. And the woman that is dead had jewels – I have seen them on her – diamonds and rubies in rings and bracelets fit for the vrouw of King Solomon himself. The Englishman did not bury them with her under that verdoemte kopje that he built with his two hands, and they are not in the boxes in the living-waggon."
"Did he not?" asked Bough, looking the Boer driver full in the face with a pleasant smile. "Are they not?"
Smoots Beste's piggish eyes twinkled round the bar-room, looked up at the ceiling, down at the floor, anywhere but into Bough's. He spat, and said in a much more docile tone:
"What do you want me to do?"
Bough leaned over the counter, and said confidentially:
"Just this, friend. I want you to inspan, and take one of the waggons up to Gueldersdorp, with a letter from me to the Civil Commissioner. I will tell him how the man is dead, and he will send down a magistrate's clerk to put a seal on the boxes and cases, and then he will go through the letters and papers in the pocket-book, and write to the people of the dead man over in England, supposing he has any, for I have heard him tell my wife there was not a living soul of his name now, except the child – "
"But what good will all this do you and me, Baas?" asked the Boer subserviently.
Bough spread his hands and shrugged his shoulders.
"Why, when the magistrates and lawyers have hunted up the man's family, there will be an order to sell the waggons and oxen and other property to pay the expenses of his burying, and the child's keep here and passage from Cape Town, if she is to be sent to England … and what is left over, see you, after the law expenses have been paid, will go to the settlement of our just claims. They will never let honest men suffer for behaving square, sure no, they'll not do that!"
But though Bough's words were full of faith in the fair dealing of the lawyers and magistrates, his tone implied doubt.
"Boer lawyers are slim rogues at best, and Engelsch lawyers are duyvels as well as rogues," said Smoots Beste, with a dull flash of originality.
Bough nodded, and pushed another glass of liquor across the bar.
"And that's true enough. I've a score to settle with one or two of 'em. By gum! I call myself lucky to be in this with a square man like you. There's the waggon, brand-new – you know what it cost at Cape Town – and the team, I trust you to take up to Gueldersdorp, and who's to hinder a man who hasn't the fear of the Lord in him from heading north-east instead of north-west, selling the waggon and the beasts at Kreilstad or Schoenbroon, and living on a snug farm of your own for the rest of your life under another man's name, where the English magistrates and the police will never find you, though their noses were keener than the wild dogs?"
"Alamachtig!" gasped Smoots Beste, rendered breathless by the alluring, tempting prospect. Surely the devil spoke with the voice of the tavern-keeper Bough, when, in human form, he tempted children of men. Sweat glistened on Smoots' flabby features, his thick hands trembled, and his bowels were as water. But his purpose was solidifying in his brain as he said innocently, looking over Bough's left shoulder at the wooden partition that divided off the bar from the landlord's dwelling-room:
"Aye, I am no dirty schelm that cannot be trusted. Therefore would it not be better if I took both teams and waggons, and all the rooinek's goods with me up to Gueldersdorp, and handed it over to the Engelsch landrost there?"
The fish was hooked. Bough said, steadily avoiding those twirling eyes:
"A good notion, but the lawyer chaps at Gueldersdorp will want to look at the Englishman's dead body to be able to satisfy his people that he did not die of a gunshot, or of a knife-thrust; we must bury him, of course, but not too deep for them to dig him up again. And they will want to ferret in all the corners of the room where he died, and make sure that his bags and boxes have not been tampered with – and then there is the child. In a way" – he spoke slowly and apologetically – "the kid and the goods are my security for getting my own back again – if ever I do. So you will inspan one of the waggons – the best if you like, with a team of six beasts, and you will trek up to Gueldersdorp – you will travel light enough with only the grub you will need, and the Cape boys, and you will hand over the letter to the Resident Magistrate, and bring back the man who will act as his deputy."
But