You are invited, the very Sunday upon which the previously-recorded conversation took place, to make the acquaintance of the sprightly P. Blinders, Acting-Secretary to Commandant Selig Brounckers, Head Laager, Transvaal Republic and Orange Free State's United Forces, Tweipans.

P. Blinders, a long-bodied, short-legged young Dutch apothecary of the Free State, with short-sighted eyes behind hugely magnifying spectacles, and many fiery pimples bursting through the earthy crust of him, possibly testifying to the presence of volcanic fires beneath, had acted in the clerkly capacity to the Volksraad at Groenfontein. When Government did not sit at the Raad Zaal, Blinders, as calmly as any ordinary being might have done, dispensed jalap, castor-oil, and pill-stick over the counter of his store. These are the three heroic besoms employed by enlightened and conscientious Boer housewives for sweeping out the interiors of their families.

Pill-stick is rhubarb-pill in the concrete. The thrifty mother buys a foot or so, and pinches off a bolus of the required magnitude thrice in the year. No dosing is allowed in between; the members of the family get it when the proper time comes round. To everyone his or her share, not forgetting the baby.

When P. Blinders came away, he left his grandfather to keep store, previously explaining to the aged man the difference between hydrocyanic acid and almond-essence for cake-flavouring, powders of corrosive sublimate and Gregory's. By a subtle transition the apothecary-clerk then became the epistolary right-hand of General Brounckers, whose wife, son, and grandson, with P. Blinders, made up his personal staff. And round the Commandant's living-waggon, where they harboured, Chaos reigned and Confusion prevailed, and disputes in many tongues—English severely excepted—made Babel. And, side by side with the domestic, decent virtues weltered all the vices rampant in the Cities of The Plain.

It goes without saying that the fresh site of Head Laager had been cunningly chosen. It occupied a shield-shaped plateau among low, flat-topped hills. The single street of Tweipans bounded it upon the east, and a rocky ridge upon the western side that might have been the vertebra of some huge reptile of the Diluvian Period, protected camp and village from British shell-practice.

Signs of this were not lacking. Waggons with shattered timbers and fantastically twisted irons, broken carts, and guns dismounted from their carriages, were to be seen, near the dismembered or disembowelled bodies of the beasts that had drawn them. Dead horse or mule or bullock, decomposing in the sun, seemed to have nothing of offence for Republican noses. The yellow smear of lyddite was everywhere, and, looking over the rock-rampart upon the works below, you saw it like a blight, or yolk of egg spilt upon a war-map.

Family parties bivouacked in those bottle-shaped trenches where each fighting unit had his separate box of provisions sunk in the earth beside him, and his cooking-fire of chips and dry dung, and ate and slept and smoked and shot as he thought good. And in despite of such fires, the unrestricted space and pure hill-air notwithstanding, the noisome ditches wherein the cribbed, cabined, and confined defenders of Gueldersdorp alternately grilled and soaked, were alleys of musk-roses, marvels of sanitary purity compared with the works of the besiegers, and the abominable camps, where, in the absence of a nocturnally active Quartermaster-Sergeant, with his band of pioneers, stench took you by the throat and nose, while filth absorbed you over the ankles.

A whiff of peculiarly overpowering potency, reaching you, made you turn away, and then the immense disorder of the camp seized and held your eyes.

Arms, saddles, karosses, blankets, clothing, panniers of provisions and boxes of ammunition, were piled about in mountainous heaps. Of military organisation, discipline, authority, law, as these are understood by civilised nations, there was nothing whatever. Men in well-worn velveteens and felt billycocks, hobnobbed with men in the gaudiest uniforms ever evolved by the theatrical costumier. Green velvet and gold lace, topped by cocked hats that had despoiled the ostrich to make a human biped vainly ridiculous, adorned Ginirals and Cornels that had no rigiments belongun' to 'um at all at all! and had come over from the Distressful Country to make a bould bid for glory, with the experience of warfare acquired while lurking behind hedges with shot-guns, in waiting for persons in disfavour with the Land League.

Patriarchs of eighty years and callow schoolboys of sixteen fought side by side with the fine flower and the lusty prime of Boer manhood, and many had their wives and children with them under the Transvaal colours, and not a few had brought their mothers. When an officer had any order to give his men, he prefaced it with the Boer equivalent for "Hi!" When the men had heard as much as they considered necessary, they would say, "Come on; let's be going," and slouch away.

P. Blinders, being a Dutchman of the Free State, minded smells no more than a Transvaal Boer. Yet it sometimes occurred to him as odd that the duties of a Secretary should embrace the peeling of potatoes and the performance of other duties of the domestic kind.

He was squatting in the shadow of the Commandant's living-waggon, polishing off the last of a panful, when Van Busch came along. English being an unpopular language, the big Johannesburger and the little Free Stater exchanged greetings in the Taal.

"Ging oop, and leave your woman's work there, and walk a piece with me," said Van Busch. "I have something to say to you about my sister that married the German drummer, and is stopping at Kink's Hotel."

You can see Van Busch taking off his broad-brimmed hat, and knocking the sweat from the leather lining-band. He was dressed in a black broadcloth tailed-coat, flannel shirt, and cord breeches, wore heavy veldschoens, and carried a Mauser rifle, as did everybody else, and had a long hunting-knife as well as a heavy six-shooter in the wide canvas pouch-belt, and a bandolier heavy with cartridges. Thus panoplied, he accurately resembled ten thousand other men.

But his dark, overfed, full-blooded, whiskered face was not that of an agriculturist, and the strange light eyes, rust-coloured like those of an adder, and, like the ophidian's, set flush with the oddly-flattened edges of their orbits, were at variance with the high, rounded, benevolent temples crowned with a thinning brake of curly hair. The rapacious mouth, with the thick scarlet lips, belonged to the eyes.

He had put on his hat again, but he swept it off in a flourishing bow, as Mevrouw Brounckers, in high-kilted wincey, a man's hat of coarse straw perched on her weather-beaten, sandy-grey head, came stumping down the waggon-ladder, calling for her potatoes. What was that lazy bedelaar of a Secretary about, and it nearly eleven of the clock? Didn't he know that her Commandant liked his meals on time?

Mevrouw received the politeness less graciously than the potatoes. That man with the eyes and the greedy red mouth was a woman-eater, she knew. Not for sheep and bear would she, grandmother as she was, trust herself in house barn alone with a klant like that. But her Commandant had uses for him, the twinkling-eyed, soft-mannered, big rogue. She watched him walking off with P. Blinders, for whom she entertained a distaste grounded on the knowledge that no good ever came of these double-tongued Free Staters.

And this one could write in the accursed shibboleth of England as well as in the Taal. She shook her head as the potatoes rattled into the big pot hanging over the fire. And he walked out on Sundays with the young German woman who was maid to the refugee-widow staying at Kink's Hotel, and who never showed her nose inside the Gerevormed Kerk, the godless thing! or went out except by bat-light. Of that one the Mevrouw Brounckers had her opinion also. And time would show who was right.

Meanwhile, Van Busch and P. Blinders, who had left the dorp behind them, and strolled up the almost dry bed of a sluit leading up amongst the hills, conversed, in Sabbath security from English artillery, and reassuring remoteness from Dutch eavesdroppers. And their theme was the German drummer's refugee-widow who never went to kerk.

Van Busch, who found it helpful in his business never to forget faces, had met her on the rail, months back, travelling up first-class from Cape Town. Early in October it was, while the road was still open. And men who kept their eyes skinned went backwards and forwards and round and about, getting the hang of things, and laying up accurate mental notes, because the other kind were even more risky to carry than the nuggets and raw dust that are hidden in the padded linings of the gold-smugglers' heavy garments.

The lady, small, dark, stylishly-tailored, and with bright black, bird-like eyes, was not a German drummer's widow when Van Busch and she first met. She had chatted in her native English with her square, bulky, sleek-looking fellow-passenger, well-dressed in grey linen drill frock-coat and trousers, with blazing diamonds studding the bosom of his well-starched shirt and linking his cuffs.

The wide felt hat he politely removed as he came into the carriage revealed to Lady Hannah a tall, expansive, well-developed forehead. Below the line of the hat-rim he was burned coffee-brown, like many another British Colonial. The observant eye of "Gold Pen" took in the man's vulgarly handsome features and curiously light eyes, and twinkled at the flaring jewellery and the whiskers of obsolete Dundreary pattern that stood out on either side the jewelled one's full, smooth chin. His large, bold, over-red mouth, with the curling outward flange to it, gave her a disagreeable impression. One would have been grateful for a beard that hid that mouth.

Lady Hannah found it curiously disquieting until her fellow-traveller began to talk, in a thick, lisping voice, with curiously candid and simple intonations. He presented himself, and she accepted him at his own valuation, as a British Johannesburger, and influential member of the Chamber of Mines, possessing vast interests among the tall chimneys and white dumping-heaps of the Rand.

Van Busch called his efforts to be ingratiating "sucking up to" the lady. He sucked up, thinking at first she might be the wife of the English field officer who had been ordered down from the north to take over the Gueldersdorp command. Then he found she was only the grey mare of an officer of the Staff....

She plied Van Busch in his triple character of politician, patriot, and mine-owner with questions. Thought she was juicing a lot of information, whereas Van Busch was the one who learned things. Kind of playing at being newspaper-woman she was, and taking notes for London newspaper articles all the time. Had laid out to be a little tin imitation of Dora Corr, or, say, nickel-plated, with cast chasings. Was burning for an opening in the diplomatic go-betweening line; wanted to dabble in War Correspondence, and so on. But Van Busch gathered that the biggest egg in the little lady's nest of ambitions was the desire to do a flutter on the Secret Service lay.

She wanted to be what he termed a "slew," and she would have called a spy. He fiddled to her dancing, and wearied before she did.

"What Woman has done Woman may do!" was the burden of her ceaseless song. And when she left the train at Gueldersdorp, "Au revoir" said she with a flash of her bright black eyes, nodding to the big Colonial, who was so excessively civil about handing out her dressing-case and travelling-bag. "Many thanks, and don't give me away if you should happen to meet me in a different skin one of these fine days, Mr. Van Busch."

"Sure, no; not I," said the burly Johannesburger, with an effusion of what looked like genuine admiration. "By thunder! when it comes to playing the risky game there's no daring to beat a woman's. Give me a petticoat, say I, for a partner every time."

"Bravo!" Her eyes snapped approvingly. She waved a little hand towards a large pink officer of the British Imperial Staff, who was looking into all the first-class compartments in search of a wife who had been vainly entreated to remain at Cape Town. "There's my husband, who entertains the precisely opposite opinion. But he hasn't your experience—only a theory worn thin by generations of ancestors, all chivalrous Conservative noodles, who kept their females in figurative cotton-wool. Do let me introduce you. I'd simply love to have him hear you talk."

Van Busch did not pant to make the acquaintance of the Military Authorities. He thanked the impulsive Lady Hannah, but made haste to climb back into the train. The big pink officer recognised the object of his search, and strode down the platform bellowing a welcome. As Lady Hannah waved in reply, the Johannesburger made a long arm from the window, and thrust a pencil-scrawled card into the tiny gloved hand.

"S's'h! Shove that away somewhere safe," said Van Busch, in a thrillingly mysterious whisper; "and, remember, any time you want to learn the lay of the land and follow up the spoor of movements on the quiet, that Van Busch, of the British South African Secret War-Intelligence-Bureau, is the man to put you on. A line to that address, care of W. Bough, will always get me. And with nerve and josh like yours, and plenty of money for palm-oil...." His greedy mouth made a grinning red gash in the smug brown face with the fine whiskers of blackish-brown. His cold eyes scintillated and twinkled unspeakable things at the little lady as the train carried him away.

Assuredly Van Busch understood women no less thoroughly than his near relative, Bough. He knew that you could bait for and catch the sex with things that were not tangible. Men wanted to be made sure of money or money's worth. And for the co-operation of P. Blinders in the adroit little game by which the German drummer's refugee-widow who stayed at Kink's Hotel, and only went out after dark, had been relieved of a handsome sum, Van Busch had had to part with nearly one-third of the swag. No wonder he felt and talked like a robbed man.

"All very well to talk," said P. Blinders, scratching his newest pimple, and looking with exaggerated moonish simplicity at nobody in particular through his large round magnifying spectacles. "But what could you have done without me, once the little Englishwoman smelled the porcupine in the barrel? When she drove out to your friend Bough's plaats at Haarsgrond in that spider, pretending she was your sister that had married a Duitscher drummer in Gueldersdorp, and buried him, and was afraid to be shut up in the stad with all those lustful rooineks, you thought it would be enough to tell her Staats Police or Transvaal burghers were after her to make her creep into a mousehole and pay you to keep her hid. And it did work nicely—for a while. Then the Englishwoman got angry—oh, very angry!—and told you things that were not nice. Either you should put her in the way of getting the information she wanted, or good-bye to her dear brother, Hendryk Van Busch, and his friend Bough."

"For a pinch of mealies I'd have let the little shrew go, by thunder!" said the affectionate relative. "But my good heart stopped me. The country wasn't safe for a couple of women to go looping about," he added. "And one of them with two hundred pounds in Bank of England notes stitched into the front of her stays...."

"Five hundred pounds," said the Secretary, with pleasantly twinkling spectacles. Van Busch's stare was admirable in its incredulity.

"Sure, no, brother; not so much as that?"

"Trudi told me," smirked P. Blinders.

"You and her seem to be great and thick together," said Van Busch, with a flattering leer. The little ex-apothecary placed his hand upon his chest, and said, with a gleam of tenderness lighting up his spectacles:

"I have sighed, and she has smiled." He went on, "If your friend Bough had been brave enough to try and take away that wad of banknotes from the little Englishwoman, he would have met trouble. For in a pocket of her gown she carries a revolver, and sleeps with it under her pillow by night; that is another thing that Trudi has told me." He kissed his fingers, and waved them in the direction of Kink's Hotel. "She is a lovely maiden!" He blew his nose without the assistance of a pocket-handkerchief, and continued:

"Of course, Bough might have put some stuff in the Englishwoman's coffee that would have made her sleep while he stole that money, or he might even have killed her quietly, and buried her on the farm. But a man who does that is not so clever and so wise as the man who makes a plan that gets the money and keeps friends all round, and makes everybody happy—is he, now? And that man is me, and that plan was mine. From P. Blinders you have genuine information to sell the Englishwoman, and when she has bought it, paying well for it, and written it all down in her despatches to the Commandant at Gueldersdorp, she hands the letters back to you to be smuggled through the lines, and pays through the nose for that also. And who shall say she is cheated? For the letters do get through"—the pimply countenance of P. Blinders was quite immobile, but the eyes behind the great spectacles twirled and twinkled with infinite meaning—"a week or so after date, perhaps, but what is that? Nothing—nothing at all."

"Nothing," agreed Van Busch. The two men smiled pleasantly in each other's faces for a minute more. Then said Van Busch, with a loud sigh:

"But what I have to tell you now is something. The Englishwoman has got no more money. Ask Trudi, if you think I lie. And, of course, the plan was a good plan, and you were a smart fellow to hit on it; but now the two hundred pounds is gone——"

"Three hundred remain to get." P. Blinders briskly held up five stumpy red fingers and tucked down the thumb and little finger, leaving a trio of mute witnesses to the correctness of his arithmetic.

"No more remains to get. The cow has run dry."

The brow of P. Blinders grew scarlet as a stormy sunrise.

"Hoe? What is this I hear?" he demanded with indignation. "Nothing left, and I have not had but a hundred and fifty out of the five hundred. There has been dishonesty somewhere. There have been tricks, unbefitting the dealings of scrupulous Christian men. Foei, foei!"

Van Busch stuck his thumbs into his belt and smiled amiably down into the indignant eyes behind the spectacles. Then he said, with his most candid look and simplest lisp:

"No tricks, brother; all fair and above-board. Ask the Commandant whether Van Busch is square or not? He knows that the hundred and fifty was paid you honestly on his account, and that I kept but fifty for myself. And you're not the chap to bilk him of his due. Sure no, you'll never do that, never! Go and see him now, and settle up. I had a talk with young Schenk Eybel this morning, and he says the answer to the screeve you wrote to the Officer in Command at Gueldersdorp—to patch up an exchange of the Englishwoman for that slim kerel of a Boer's son they got their claws on at the beginning of the siege—has come in under the white flag this morning. Schenk Eybel has a little plan he can't put through without Walt Slabberts, he says. Loop, brother. You'll find the old man on his grey pony near the Field Hospital."

The eyes behind the spectacles whirled in terror. The ex-apothecary faltered:

"What—what is this you say? The money paid me on the Commandant's account—when it was to be a secret between us.... Foei, foei! This is unfair. And suppose I have spent it, how shall I replace it? Do you wish to ruin an honest man?"

Van Busch grinned, and P. Blinders gave up hopelessly. At least, it seemed so, for he turned sharp round, and trotted off with sorrowfully-drooping black coat-tails, in search of the meek grey pony and the terrible old man.

But the front view of the Secretary displayed a countenance whose pimples radiated satisfaction, and spectacles that were alight with joy. Much—very much—would P. Blinders have liked to have kept that hundred and fifty, but his fear had proved greater than his desire.

He had paid every tikkie of the money faithfully to Brounckers, and his hands were metaphorically clean, and his neck comfortably safe. He was the poorer by a hundred and fifty pounds, but the richer in wisdom and experience; and—he chuckled at the thought of this—in the joy of knowing himself, in postscripts appended to those despatches of the Englishwoman's, to have poked sly sarcasm at the British Lion. Whose spiny tail P. Blinders imagined to be lashing, even then, at the prick of the goad.

For another thing, very pleasant to think of, he had successfully pitted the cunning behind his giant spectacles against the superior villainy of Mr. Van Busch of Johannesburg.