man that the game he
was about to play was hazardous in the extreme.

"If you _must_ go out with those men, leave on Monday night, when the
others have escaped in safety," was his last advice to Delport.

Unfortunately, Fate decreed that Krause and Delport should meet
accidentally on Sunday morning, the day after Mr. Botha's warning to
Krause.

Together the two men, flinging caution to the winds, or perhaps in
their enthusiasm entirely forgetting the wise counsel of their friend,
laid their heads together, and agreed to meet at a certain point that
night, Krause with the wounded German and two or three of his most
faithful friends, and Delport with his party of fifty men.

[Illustration: ADOLPH KRAUSE.]

As Mr. Botha, with strange intuition, had predicted, there were
dastardly traitors in that group of fifty men--Judas-Boers--who, under
the pretence of seeking an opportunity of joining the burgher forces,
had persuaded Delport to allow them to accompany him. That _he_ was
innocent in this black crime of hideous treachery, no one who knew him
ever had a doubt.

At the appointed place the two men met. Farther on they were joined by
the wounded German and his comrades; still farther, beyond the
boundary of the town, under a cluster of trees, well known to them as
a secret trysting-place, the large party had assembled one by one and
was awaiting the arrival of its leaders.

The latter, seeing in the distance a group of moving figures which
they took to be their friends, walked boldly and serenely forward--to
find themselves a moment later in a most deadly trap!

The conflict must have been a desperate one!

He who played so brave a part in it, Krause, the only armed man on his
side, shot down his opponents one by one, until they closed on him,
and then, overpowered by the fearful odds and battered beyond
recognition by heavy blows from the butt-ends of their guns, he was at
last pinioned to the ground by his infuriated captors.

Three men were taken, Krause, Venter (a mere boy, the son of a widow
in Pretoria), and one other--who must be nameless here.

Of the rest some fled into the open veld, while others, hopelessly
ignorant of their surroundings or of the route to take, wisely
returned to town under cover of the darkness of the night.

With one exception. Fritz W., the wounded German, lost his way and was
unable to go back to town before the curfew-bell, the hour at which
every resident was supposed t