it, it
cannot be said that he lacked sincerity.

There are people in Rhodesia who speak of him without love. They
describe him as the greatest land thief that ever rode a Zeedersburg
coach from Port Charter to Salisbury to register land that he had
obtained by trickery. They tell stories of those wonderful coach drives
of his with relays of twelve mules waiting every ten miles. They speak
of his gambling propensities, of ten-thousand-acre farms that changed
hands at the turn of a card, and there are stories that are less
printable. When M'Lupi, a little Mashona chief, found gold in '92, and
refused to locate the reef, it was John Minute who staked him out and
lit a grass fire on his chest until he spoke.

Many of the stories are probably exaggerated, but all Rhodesia agrees
that John Minute robbed impartially friend and foe. The confidant of
Lo'Ben and the Company alike, he betrayed both, and on that terrible day
when it was a toss of a coin whether the concession seekers would be
butchered in Lo'Ben's kraal, John Minute escaped with the only
available span of mules and left his comrades to their fate.

Yet he had big, generous traits, and could on occasions be a tender and
a kindly friend. He had married when a young man, and had taken his wife
into the wilds.

There was a story that she had met a handsome young trader and had
eloped with him, that John Minute had chased them over three hundred
miles of hostile country from Victoria Falls to Charter, from Charter to
Marandalas, from Marandalas to Massikassi, and had arrived in Biera so
close upon their trail that he had seen the ship which carried them to
the Cape steaming down the river.

He had never married again. Report said that the woman had died of
malaria. A more popular version of the story was that John Minute had
relentlessly followed his erring wife to Pieter Maritzburg and had shot
her and had thereupon served seven years on the breakwater for his sin.

About a man who is rich, powerful, and wholly unpopular, hated by the
majority, and feared by all, legends grow as quickly as toadstools on a
marshy moor. Some were half true, some wholly apocryphal, deliberate,
and malicious inventions. True or false, John Minute ignored them all,
denying nothing, explaining nothing, and even refusing to take action
against a Cape Town weekly which dealt with his career in a spirit of
unpardonable frankness.

There was only one person in the world whom he loved mor