husband. He
shortly afterwards made quite a liberal remittance to his wife, and his
troopers pushed Kruger half-sovereigns across most of the bars in
Gueldersdorp shortly after the purchase by a Dopper farmer of a teak-built
Cape waggon that a particular friend of the sergeant's had got to sell.
And they were careful, at first, not to wag loose tongues. But as time
went on the story of the English traveller who had brought the body of the
woman to the Free State Hotel, so many days' trek to the southwards from
Gueldersdorp, trickled from lip to lip. And years later, years too late,
it came to the ears of a friend of dead Richard Mildare.

The sergeant maintained silence. He was a careful officer, and a discreet
man, and, what is more, religious. In controversial arguments with the
godless he would sometimes employ a paraphrase of the story of Smoots
Beste to strengthen his side.

"A chap's a blamed fool that doesn't believe in God, I tell you. I was
once after a bung-nosed Dutch thief of a transport-driver, that had
waltzed away with a brand-new Cape cart and a team of first-class mules.
Taking 'em up to Pretoria on the quiet, to sell 'em to Oom Paul's
burghers, he was. Ay, they were worth a tidy lump! A storm came on--a
regular Vaal display of sky-fireworks. The rain came down like
gun-barrels, the veld turned into a swamp, but we kept on after the
Dutchman, who drove like gay old Hell. Presently comes a blue blaze and a
splitting crack, as if a comet had come shouldering into the map of South
Africa, and knocked its head in. We pushed on, smelling sulphur, burnt
flesh, and hair. 'By gum!' said I; 'something's got it'; and I was to
rights. The Cape cart stood on the veld, without a scratch on the
paintwork. The four mules lay in their traces, deader than pork. The
Dutchman sat on the box, holding the lines and his voorslag, and grinning.
He was dead, too--struck by the lightning in the act of stealing
those mules and that Cape cart. Don't let any fellow waste hot air after
that trying to persuade me that there isn't such a thing as an overruling
Providence!"

Thus the sergeant: and his audience, whether Free-thinkers, Agnostics, or
believers, would break up, feeling that one who has the courage of his
opinions is a respectable man.

As for Bough, in whose hands even the astute sergeant had been as a peeled
rush, we may go back and find him counting money in gold and notes that
had been taken from the belt of the d