eful Tweipans time? That is
what I want to get at."

"Oh, hell! how do I know?" He had turned sulky and scowling, but her blood
was fairly up.

"I know that you have successfully swindled me out of five hundred pounds.
I know that when I met you on the train four months back you shaped your
plans and baited a trap----"

"To catch a silly woman." His scarlet lips rolled back from his
tobacco-stained teeth. His jeering eyes were intolerable. "Ay, maybe I
did. And what's to say now?"

"I say you are a blackguard, Mr. Bough Van Busch!"

The dark face with the light eyes underwent a murderous change. He glanced
over his shoulders right and left, and took a step towards her, carrying
out the movement suddenly, as a tarantula darts upon its prey. Before the
thick brown muscular fingers had choked the scream that rose in her
throat, the key crashed in the lock, and the door was violently kicked
open, admitting ...

No portrait is required of that burly, bald-browed, sharp-eyed,
grizzle-bearded, square-jawed farmer, of the bronzed and sun-cracked
countenance, implacable under the slouch-hat with the orange-leather band.
We know the old green overcoat, and coarse corduroy breeches, and roughly
tanned leather boots, with heavy, old-fashioned spurs, to have been the
husk of a fierce, and indomitable, and relentless warrior, twinned with a
quiet family-man of bucolic tastes and patriarchal habits.

Van Busch, broader by inches and taller by half a head, dwindled, seen in
juxtaposition with this man of the iron will and the leader's temperament,
to a flabby, dwarfish, and petty being. The fierce grey eyes took him in,
and read him, and dropped him, and fastened on the little Englishwoman, as
the great boots tramped heavily across the floor, and the great voice
roared, speaking in the Taal:

"Pull up that blind! Voor den donder! Shall we be mice, that sit and
squeak in the dark?"

Down came the Mevrouw Kink's square of glazed yellow calico, roller, cord,
and all, at the impatient wrench of the big, heavy hand.... The window was
blocked with heavy bodies, topped by brown, white, or yellow faces; the
street was a sea of them, all staring with greedy, curious eyes at the
little Englishwoman who was a prisoner, and the big man who ruled them by
Fear. His angry grey eyes blazed at the gapers, and the crowd surged back
a foot or two. Then the fierce eyes darted back at pale Lady Hannah, and
the roaring voice began again:

"You