often enough when we
hunted kudu on the Kafue.'

Peter nodded. 'Do we sit still in a German town?' he asked anxiously.
'I shouldn't like that, Cornelis.'

'We move gently eastward to Constantinople,' I said.

Peter grinned. 'We should cover a lot of new country. You can reckon
on me, friend Cornelis. I've always had a hankering to see Europe.'

He rose to his feet and stretched his long arms.

'We'd better begin at once. God, I wonder what's happened to old Solly
Maritz, with his bottle face? Yon was a fine battle at the drift when
I was sitting up to my neck in the Orange praying that Brits' lads
would take my head for a stone.'

Peter was as thorough a mountebank, when he got started, as Blenkiron
himself. All the way back to Lisbon he yarned about Maritz and his
adventures in German South West till I half believed they were true.
He made a very good story of our doings, and by his constant harping on
it I pretty soon got it into my memory. That was always Peter's way.
He said if you were going to play a part, you must think yourself into
it, convince yourself that you were it, till you really were it and
didn't act but behaved naturally. The two men who had started that
morning from the hotel door had been bogus enough, but the two men that
returned were genuine desperadoes itching to get a shot at England.

We spent the evening piling up evidence in our favour. Some kind of
republic had been started in Portugal, and ordinarily the cafes would
have been full of politicians, but the war had quieted all these local
squabbles, and the talk was of nothing but what was doing in France and
Russia. The place we went to was a big, well-lighted show on a main
street, and there were a lot of sharp-eyed fellows wandering about that
I guessed were spies and police agents. I knew that Britain was the one
country that doesn't bother about this kind of game, and that it would
be safe enough to let ourselves go.

I talked Portuguese fairly well, and Peter spoke it like a Lourenco
Marques bar-keeper, with a lot of Shangaan words to fill up. He
started on curacao, which I reckoned was a new drink to him, and
presently his tongue ran freely. Several neighbours pricked up their
ears, and soon we had a small crowd round our table.

We talked to each other of Maritz and our doings. It didn't seem to be
a popular subject in that cafe. One big blue-black fellow said that
Maritz was a dirty swine who would soon be hang