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If a clever woman could be the confidante of a Cabinet Minister, the post of right-hand to the Officer Commanding H.M. Forces in Gueldersdorp might be won. And then the world would know what Hannah Wrynche was born for. What was he saying? "I never warn my victims beforehand." "Sphinx! and I hoped to find you in the relenting mood!"
Only a day previously the centipede-like procession of girls of all ages, in charge of nuns and pupil-teachers, in passing over the Gueldersdorp Recreation-Ground, had sustained an experience with which every maiden bosom would have been still vibrating had not an event even more exciting occurred between the early morning roll-call and prayers-muster and breakfast.
He shortly afterwards made quite a liberal remittance to his wife, and his troopers pushed Kruger half-sovereigns across most of the bars in Gueldersdorp shortly after the purchase by a Dopper farmer of a teak-built Cape waggon that a particular friend of the sergeant's had got to sell. And they were careful, at first, not to wag loose tongues.
He sucked up, thinking at first she might be the wife of the English field officer who had been ordered down from the north to take over the Gueldersdorp command. Then he found she was only the grey mare of an officer of the Staff.... She plied Van Busch in his triple character of politician, patriot, and mine-owner with questions.
There are one or two others that are duyvels, and not men. And the worst duyvel of all" he waved the big hand westward "is he over there at Gueldersdorp." She mentally registered the compliment. "You are a woman who writes for the Engelsch newspapers that are full of shameless tales about the Boers." He spat copiously upon the floor, and the big voice became a bellow. "Lies, lies!
"Perhaps you'll manage a smile when you've read this?" Bingo stops in his stride, wheels, and receives an official document on blue paper. Under the date of the previous day, it runs as follows: "HEAD LAAGER, "TWEIPANS, "January th. "To the Colonel Commanding the British Forces in Gueldersdorp.
She was no longer in any doubt as to the identity of the owner of the voice. Van Busch was in Gueldersdorp ... and however he came, and whatever disguise of person or of purpose sheltered him, his presence boded no good. The merely logical masculine mind doffs hat respectfully before the superiority of feminine intuition.
A roll-top desk was partly broken open, but not rifled, the American boltlocks having defied the clumsy efforts of the thief, Koets, the Dutch dispensarist, who had cleared out of Gueldersdorp, under cover of the previous night, crossing, with the portable property reft from the accursed Englander, the barbed-wire fence that formed the line of demarcation between the British Imperial Forces and the Army of the United Republics.
Those enemies shall never enter Gueldersdorp!" She was radiant now, with that smile upon her lips, and that glow in the great eyes that met his with such frank approval. Confound it, what business had a nun to be anything like so beautiful? Would she pale, would she tremble, when he told her the last truth of all?
He ended with an irrepressible outburst of honest indignation: "Why, you blasted, thieving Dutch scum, do you think I don't know you were stealing that span and waggon?" And as Smoots, sweating freely, unyoked the dead oxen, he decided in his heavy mind that he would be missing long before the convoy got to Gueldersdorp. Nine waggons rolled on where only eight had been before.
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