ts should mistake a
friend in the darkness, he waited for light in a little thorny kloof
beyond their advanced outposts; and the dawn came, with an awful gush of
crimson dyeing all the eastern sky, so that the pools about his feet--even
the drops of wet upon the stones and bushes--caught the ruddy reflection,
and all the world seemed dripping with new-shed blood.

Then up had rushed the sun, and smitten a glorious rainbow out of fog and
vapour, and one end of it seemed to be in Gueldersdorp, resting in a
golden mist upon the Convent's shattered roof, while the other vanished in
mid-heaven. It had seemed to the murderer like a ladder by which the dead
woman's soul went climbing, up and up, to tell his crime to God....

He had killed her, that woman in black, to stop her from blowing on him.
Who would have dreamed a meek, sober nun could be transformed like that? A
lioness whose cub has been shot, straightway becomes a beast-devil. She,
standing on the naked steps of the bare altar, with upraised,
black-sleeved arms and black funereal robes, demanding Heaven's vengeance
for that deed of old, calling down the judgment of God upon its doer, had
been infinitely more terrible than the lioness. Lightning had flashed from
her great eyes, and subtle electric forces had darted from her outspread
finger-tips. While she looked at him and spoke she enmeshed him, helpless,
in a net of terror. It was only when she had turned her back that Bough
had had the nerve to shoot. And he was no novice in bloodshed--not he.
There were things safely hidden and put away and buried, that might some
day put a rope round some man's neck. But the man would never be Bough.
There had always been a scapegoat to suffer until now.

He ate more opium now than ever, because he could not forget that woman's
awful eyes. He would see them looking at him in the dark, when he could
not sleep. Her voice haunted him, terrible in its clarion-note of wrath,
its organ-roll of denunciation. The hand that had pointed to the millstone
about his neck had conjured it there. He felt it dragging him down.

Maar--that was the gold! You can carry a goodly amount of the precious
metal upon your single person, if you are clever enough to stow it and
muscular enough to walk lightly under the weight. And a great deal of the
yellow stuff, gathered and stored by the mining companies, leaked about
this time out of the hiding-places skilfully contrived for it into the
pockets of Va