himney, and seemed to grope and fumble at the back of the hearth.
He raised himself then, stepped back, and called out sharply in the Taal:

"Wie is daar?"

The man's voice dropped back dead out of the choked-up chimney-throat. A
little sooty dust fell. There was no other answer. The voice was lifted
again, speaking this time in English:

"Is anyone hiding here?"

No one replied, and the little officer seemed to give up. He lingered a
moment longer, struck a match as though to light a cigarette, then went
quickly out of the kitchen. An orderly waited with his horse outside the
gateway. Bough Van Busch, listening with strained ears, heard the clink of
spur against stirrup, the creak of the saddle receiving a rider's weight.
There was a short sharp whistle, followed by the sound of cantering hoofs,
and the rattle of hurrying wheels dying out over the veld to the
north-east. The unwelcome intruders had gone. Bough Van Busch, after a
cautious interval, deemed it safe to descend.

He was red-smeared with veld dust and white-smeared with mortar, and black
with old soot. His bulky body oscillated as he let himself down from beam
to stanchion, finding sure foothold in the crevices, and hand-grip in the
stout iron hooks from which plump mutton-hams and beef sausages had hung
ripening in the pungent smoke of burning wood and dried dung. There was a
smell in his nostrils like charring wool and saltpetre. He hung over the
wide hearth now. A short drop of not more than a foot or two would bring
him safely to the ground.

Van Busch did not drop. He dangled by the hands and sweated. He blasphemed
in an agony of terror, though it seemed to him that he prayed.

For the dandy little Engineer officer had left the cigar-box lying empty
among the powdery ashes in the wide, old-world hearthplace. An
innocent-looking parcel it had contained, wrapped in a bit of old canvas,
and, further secured with copper wire and string, was wedged in a chink
between the blackened stones at the back of the hearth. From it a fuse
hung down; a short length nearly consumed by the crepitating fiery spark
at its loose end. It burned with a little purring sound, as though it
liked the business it was engaged upon. Bough Van Busch knew that in
another moment the detonation would take place....

He heard nothing of it when it came.... Nor did he know it when the walls
of Cyclopean masonry bulged and opened about him like the petals of a
flowering lily. He wa