derly, and after some solid lyin', he
owned that the man from Diamond Town had bribed him with 'baccy to let him
put a message through. And that's another link in the evidence, I take
it?" said Major Bingo.

"Undoubtedly!"

"There's not much more to tell, except," said Bingo, "that the first march
of the Division on its route to Frostenberg led past the Border farm
called Haargrond Plaats. It looked deserted and half-ruined, with only a
slipshod woman and a coloured man in charge; but something was known of
what had gone on there, and might be going on still, and the Boers are
clever stage-managers, and it don't do to trust to appearances! So the
Chief detached a party with dynamite cartridges and express orders to make
the ruin real. Our men searched the place thoroughly before they blew it
up; and hidden in a disused chimney--solid bit of old Dutch masonry big
enough to accommodate a baker's dozen of sweeps--were a few things
calculated to facilitate that search for the needle in the haystack--you
understand? Disguises of various kinds--a suit of clothes lined with
chamois-leather bags for gold-smugglin'--a good deal of the raw stuff
itself, scattered all over the shop by the blow-up--and in a rusty cashbox
a diary or private ledger, posted up in a clumsy kind of thieves' cipher,
impossible to make out, but with the name written on it of the identical
man my wife suspected and the Chief believed to be the murderer of Miss
Mildare's adopted mother! And that's what you may call the Clue Direct,
Saxham, I rather fancy?"

Major Bingo Wrynche leaned back with an air of some finality, and with
some little difficulty extracted a biggish square envelope from the left
inner pocket of the accurately-fitting frock-coat. He lightly placed the
envelope upon the blotter before Saxham; reached out and took the shiny
top-hat off the writing-table, fitted it with peculiar care on his
pinkish, sandy, close-cropped head, and said, looking at Saxham with a
pleasant smile.

"Perhaps you wouldn't mind throwin' your eye over the contents of that
envelope? There are three photographs of handwritin' inside, marked on the
backs respectively." He waited for Saxham to take the enclosures from the
big envelope, examining the polish of his own varnished patent-leather
boots with a fastidious air of anxiety that was extremely well assumed, if
it was not strictly genuine. His large face was as bland and
expressionless as the face of the grandfat