uld have meant nothing at all, even to the eye of a practised scout,
except a tavern on the lonely veld. The grave at the foot of the little
kopje located the spot.

"A veld hotel in the Orange Free State--a wretched shanty of the usual
corrugated-iron and mud-wall type, in the grass country between Driepoort
and Kroonfontein."

He heard the wraith of his own voice speaking to the dead woman who lay
under the blossoming irises at his feet. He saw her with the mental vision
quite clearly. Her great purple-grey eyes were bent on his from their
superior level, and they were inscrutable in their strange, secret
defiance, and indomitable in the determination of their regard.

Why had she been so bent upon hiding the trail? Why had she distrusted
him?

He bent upon one knee in the grass beside the slender, shrinking figure,
woman's and yet child's, and held out the little slate to her, and said,
with the smile that even backward children could not resist:

"Did you draw this?"

She nodded, with great wistful eyes, looking shyly up at him from under
their sweeping black lashes. He went on, pointing with a slender
grass-blade to each object as he named it:

"It is a house, and these are sheds and stables, and this is an orchard,
and here the Kaffirs live. But who lives in the house?"

She whispered, with a look of secret fear:

"The man lives there. And the woman."

"Tell me the man's name."

She breathed, after a hesitation that was full of troubled apprehension:

"Bough."

A red flush mounted in his thin cheek, and he drew his breath in sharply.
He asked:

"Does anyone else live in the house?"

She reflected with a knitted brow. He helped her.

"I do not mean the travellers--the men and women who come driving up in
Cape-carts and transport-waggons, and drive away again, but someone who
lives with Bough and the woman. She has been at the tavern a long, long
time, though she is so young and so little. Try to remember her name."

The knitted brow relaxed, and the beautiful dim eyes had almost a smile in
them.

"It is 'the Kid.'"

"Try and think. Has she no other name?"

She shook her head. He gave up that trail as lost, and moved the
grass-blade to another part of the drawing on the slate.

"Tell me what this is?"

She answered at once:

"It is the Little Kopje. The English traveller made it when he put the
dead woman in the ground."

His heart beat heavily, and the hand that pointed with th