XXXVI

The German drummer's refugee-widow, who lived behind two green-shuttered,
blinded windows at Kink's Hotel, and was a sister of that good Boer
Mijnheer Hendryk Van Busch--"_a sister indeed!_" snorted Mevrouw Kink; and
never went to the kerk-praying, or put her nose out of doors at all before
dark, and had a maid who did her hair, and wore her own in waves, the
impudent wench! and whose portmanteau, and bag, and boots, and shoes, and
skirt-bands, had fashionable London tradesmen's labels inside them, was
the only person in the village of Tweipans and for a mile round it--good
Nederlands measure--who did not know that she was an English
prisoner-of-war.

Her foray in quest of Secret Information had had its hardships, as its
alarms and excursions, but she plumed herself on having accomplished
something of what she had set out to do. Van Busch, not counting a week of
days when she had found reason to suspect his entire good faith, had
behaved like a staunch Johannesburger of British blood and Imperial
sympathies. But his valuable services had been rendered for so much more
than nothing that Lady Hannah found herself in the condition her Bingo was
wont to describe as "stony." She had sent for Van Busch to tell him that
the position was untenable. She would evacuate it, when he could manage
to get hold of Nixey's mouse-coloured trotter and the spider, left in the
care of Van Busch's good friend Bough, at Haargrond Plaats.

A dash for freedom then. In imagination she could hear the mouse-coloured
trotter's hoofs rattling over the stony ground, and the crack, crack of
the sentries' Mausers, followed by a hail of bullets from the trenches....
She could see the headlines of the latest newspaper sensation, flaming on
the greenish gloom of the room with the closed shutters and drawn-down
blinds:

"STIRRING STORY FROM THE SEAT OF HOSTILITIES: LADY WAR-CORRESPONDENT RUNS
THE GAUNTLET OF BOER RIFLES."

"Speshul. Hextry Speshul!"

* * * * *

Perhaps she would be mortally wounded by the time she got through the
lines, so as to hang in bleeding festoons over the splashboard, and sink
into the arms of the husband loved better than aught save Glory, gasping,
as her heroic spirit fled----

* * * * *

"Did the gracious lady say she would have her boots on?"

Trudi got up from the flattest and most uncomfortable of the two
forbidding beds Kink's principal gu