movements of the men who went in and out of the
farm-buildings as directed by their sergeant. The sergeant was an expert
in his business, and yet, after a hasty glance up the black yawning gullet
of the chimney where Bough Van Busch lay perdu, he had gone out of the
dismantled kitchen whistling a tune. Two of his men remained lounging
near the threshold. Like the sergeant they had stooped, hands on spread
knees, necks twisted awry in the effort to pierce the thick mirk beneath
the ragged arch of masonry that spanned the wide hearth where the ashes of
long-dead fires lay in powdery grey drifts, and, like the sergeant, they
had seen nothing. When you covered the man-hole between the platform-edge
and the chimney-wall with the sooty board and the old sack, it was
impossible for anyone below to see anything. The inside of the old chimney
was as black as hell.

The inquisition ended. The khaki-clad figures came hurrying out of the
house, pursued by the Dutchwoman's shrill recriminations. The
non-commissioned officer made a report to the officer of Engineers. The
men who had been deputed to search mounted at an order, and fell in with
the patrol, and sat upon their saddles outside the courtyard wall
exchanging furtive winks as the mevrouw devoted their souls and bodies to
everlasting perdition.

A quiet utterance from the little red-haired officer checked the torrent
of the woman's anger. She screeched in dismay, raising thick hands to
heaven. The coloured man's stolid silence was suddenly swept away in a
spate of oaths and protestations. Suddenly, looking in the officer's
unmoved face, they realised the uselessness of words, turned and ran
between the gateless posts, out upon, away over, the dusty, hoof-tracked,
wheel-scored veld. And their ungainly hurry and awkward gestures of terror
somehow reminded the peering Bough Van Busch of an engraving he had seen
by chance in a Dopper Bible, in which Lot and his two daughters, fearfully
foreshortened by the artist, scuttled in as grotesque an insect hurry from
the doomed vicinity of Sodom, Queen City of the Plain.

The officer of Engineers hardly glanced after the retreating couple. He
stepped across the threshold of the disused farm-kitchen, holding the
little wooden box carefully in both his dogskin-gloved hands. He crossed
to the hearth, stubbing his toe against a jutting floor-brick, and as he
did so he caught his breath. Then he stepped down under the yawning gape
of the c