h headquarters still at the Border homestead known as
Haargrond Plaats. Something drew him back to the place, and kept on
drawing him. From thence he could observe and conduct his operations, and
gather news of the besieged in Gueldersdorp. He was there at the time when
the Division--Irregular Horse and Baraland Rifles, with a half battalion
of Town Guards, converted into mounted infantry by the simple process of
putting beasts underneath men who could ride them--marched out of
Gueldersdorp _en route_ for Frostenberg.

The slatternly Dutchwoman and the coloured man who had charge of the
Plaats were too surely his creatures to betray Bough Van Busch. "Let the
dogs smell around the place," he thought, when by the sounds that reached
him in his hiding-place he knew the Advance had halted. "They'll tire of
the game before they smell out me!"

His hiding-place was a safe retreat and storehouse for stuff that it was
necessary to conceal. No one knew of it save Bough Van Busch and the
draggle-tailed woman. It was in the great stone-built chimney of the
disused, half-ruined farmhouse kitchen, a solid cube of masonry reared by
the stout hands of the old voortrekkers of 1836, its walls, three feet in
thickness, embracing the wide hearth about which the family life of the
homestead had concentrated itself in the past.

There may have been a mill on the farm in the old days. Or possibly,
meaning to build one, those robust pioneers of the Second Exodus had
dragged the two huge stones into the wilderness, and then abandoned their
plan. The lower millstone paved the hearth, the upper, the diameter of its
shaft-hole increased by chipping to the size of a musk-melon, had been set
by some freak of the farmer-architect's heavy fancy as a coping on the top
of the big stone shaft. From thence, as Lady Hannah Wrynche had said in
one of her descriptive letters, dated from "My Headquarters at the Seat of
War," it dominated the landscape as a Brobdingnagian stone mushroom might
have done.

The wide black throat of the chimney half-way up was choked by a platform
of beams and masonry, reaching not quite across, so that even a bulky man
who had climbed up--divers rusty iron stanchions driven in between the
stones, and certain chinks affording secure foothold--might wriggle
between the platform and the chimney-wall, and so lie hid securely.
Through the hole in the round stone above came air and light. Crevices
cunningly enlarged afforded opport