ore him and was asking us questions from
it. They did not amount to much, being pretty well a repetition of
those Zorn had asked us at the frontier. I answered fluently, for I
had all our lies by heart.

Then the man on the hearthrug broke in. 'I'll talk to them,
Excellency,' he said in German. 'You are too academic for those
outland swine.'

He began in the taal, with the thick guttural accent that you get in
German South West. 'You have heard of me,' he said. 'I am the Colonel
von Stumm who fought the Hereros.'

Peter pricked up his ears. '_Ja_, Baas, you cut off the chief
Baviaan's head and sent it in pickle about the country. I have seen
it.'

The big man laughed. 'You see I am not forgotten,' he said to his
friend, and then to us: 'So I treat my enemies, and so will Germany
treat hers. You, too, if you fail me by a fraction of an inch.' And
he laughed loud again.

There was something horrible in that boisterousness. Peter was
watching him from below his eyelids, as I have seen him watch a lion
about to charge.

He flung himself on a chair, put his elbows on the table, and thrust
his face forward.

'You have come from a damned muddled show. If I had Maritz in my power
I would have him flogged at a wagon's end. Fools and pig-dogs, they
had the game in their hands and they flung it away. We could have
raised a fire that would have burned the English into the sea, and for
lack of fuel they let it die down. Then they try to fan it when the
ashes are cold.'

He rolled a paper pellet and flicked it into the air. 'That is what I
think of your idiot general,' he said, 'and of all you Dutch. As slow
as a fat vrouw and as greedy as an aasvogel.'

We looked very glum and sullen.

'A pair of dumb dogs,' he cried. 'A thousand Brandenburgers would have
won in a fortnight. Seitz hadn't much to boast of, mostly clerks and
farmers and half-castes, and no soldier worth the name to lead them,
but it took Botha and Smuts and a dozen generals to hunt him down. But
Maritz!' His scorn came like a gust of wind.

'Maritz did all the fighting there was,' said Peter sulkily. 'At any
rate he wasn't afraid of the sight of the khaki like your lot.'

'Maybe he wasn't,' said the giant in a cooing voice; 'maybe he had his
reasons for that. You Dutchmen have always a feather-bed to fall on.
You can always turn traitor. Maritz now calls himself Robinson, and
has a pension from his friend Botha.'

'That,' said