rin' Party will asy know the place--asy--by the
thundherin' big hole that's knocked in the permanent way there, sizable
enough to bury...." He paused, for once at a loss.

"Korah, Dathan, and Abiram," suggested Davis, who, as a Bible Baptist, had
a fund of Scripture knowledge upon which he occasionally drew, "with their
families and their pavilions and all their substance...."

"Av Cora was there," said Kildare, "she was disguised as a Dutchman, for
sorrow an' oi I clapped on any human baste that was not a square-buttocked
Boer in tan-cord throusers. Thank you, sorr, your Honour, an' good luck to
yourself an' all av us! An' we'll dhrink your Honour's health wid it."

"We will so!" agreed Davis, as the sovereign, dropped into his own
twice-greased palm, vanished in the recesses of his black and oleaginous
overalls.

"Thankee, sir. You're a gentleman, sir!" the guard acknowledged, touching
his cap and concealing the gold coin slid into his own ready hand with
professional celerity.

"Begob! an' you might have tould the Colonel somethin' that was news,"
commented Kildare, as the tall, active figure stepped lightly over the
metals and passed up the ramp, and 123 trundled on, and backed into the
engine-shed amidst a salvo of cheers and hand-clapping.

The Colonel whistled his pleasant little tune quite through as, the
Reconnoitring Party despatched to the scene of the explosion, he went
contentedly back to luncheon at Nixey's. True, Kildare had said, and as
the Sergeant in command regretfully testified later, said correctly, that
neither Boer nor beast had been put out of action by the flying debris. A
poor reprisal had been made, in the opinion of some malcontents, for the
act of War committed by the forces of the Republics in crossing the
Border, in cutting the telegraph lines, and destroying the railway-bridge.
But the moral result was anything but trifling, in its effect upon the
Boer mind. The "new square gun" became a proverb of dread, inspiring a
salutary fear of more traps of the same kind, "set by that slim duyvel,
the English Commandant," and threw over the innocent stretch of veld
outside those trivial sand-bagged defences the glamour of the Mysterious
and the Unknown. No solid Dutchman welcomed the idea of soaring skywards
in a multitude of infinitesimal fragments, in company with other Free
Staters or sons of the Transvaal Republic similarly reduced.

No more boasts on the part of Brounckers, General