n Busch and his pals. It is weighty, as well as precious,
stuff, and when you inter it, there must be bearers as well as a
gravedigger, and when you carry away a great deal of it at a time,
confederates must aid you.

Oom Paul, when, like some elderly black humble-bee, with crooked thighs
deep laden with the metallic yellow pollen, he buzzed heavily off for
Lorenco Marques, deplored the deceitfulness of riches less bitterly than
their non-portableness.

Van Busch, by a series of clever expedients, overcame that difficulty. The
cartridges that weighed down his bandolier were of cast gold, cleverly
painted; the gun he carried was a hollow sham packed with raw gold; also,
his garments were lined and padded with the same material. At Cape Town he
would disburden himself, and one of the women who were his confederates
would take the stuff to England, and sell it in London, and bank the money
in the name of Van Busch. He so managed that there was always a woman
coming and a woman going. Women had been his tools, and his slaves, and
his victims, ever since he had been born. When the old were worn out and
useless, he shook them off, and fresh instruments rose up to take their
places.

He never trusted men in money matters. He knew too much of the power of
that yellow pollen that breeds madness in the male. But there is one thing
that most women desire more than the possession of much money, and that is
absolute possession of one man.

Bough understood women of a certain class. He had moulded them to his
will, and bent them to his whim, all his life long. He was a man of
manifold experience as regards the sex.

Lately he had added to his stock. He had stood face to face with a woman,
unarmed and in a lonely place, and had tasted Fear. He had seen--from afar
off--a woman whose slight, vivid beauty had roused in him a desire that
was torture.

It was as though the Minotaur were in love with Ariadne; it was Caliban
thirsting for the beauty of Miranda. Prospero had not come in time; the
satyr had surfeited upon the unripe grapes, and now was ahungered for the
purple cluster, tied up out of reach of those gross, greedy, wicked hands.

The locket with a picture in it and brilliants round, "that might be worth
seventy," the dainty, pearly miniature on ivory by Daudin, of the dead
woman who lay buried under the Little Kopje, and which Bough had taken
from the body of the English traveller, together with the signet-ring and
every