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No. 2 was the photograph of an oblong card. On it was written in ink, in the same bold hand: "Mr. HENDRYK VAN BUSCH, "C/o Mr. W. Bough, "Transport Agent, "Haargrond Plaats, "Near Matambani, "Transvaal." There was a silence in the consulting-room, only broken by street noises filtered thin by walls and curtains, and the ticking of the Sheraton grandfather clock, and the breathing of two people.
"There's not much more to tell, except," said Bingo, "that the first march of the Division on its route to Frostenberg led past the Border farm called Haargrond Plaats.
Then he heard movements at the chimney, and people seemed to be ascending and descending a ladder. There seemed, also, to be noises on the deck of the Blue Cock, and sounds of falling burdens and spoken words: "Maak plaats!" or make room for more. "I never heard of Santa Claus stopping so long at one humble house," thought Nanking. After awhile all sounds ceased.
A few rods from the Gevangen Poort, at the western end of the Vyverberg, on the edge of the cheerful triangle called the Plaats, and looking directly down the broad and stately Kneuterdyk, at the end of which stood Aremberg House, lately the residence of the great Advocate, was the mean and sordid scaffold. Groeneveld ascended it with perfect composure.
When she drove out to your friend Bough's plaats at Haarsgrond in that spider, pretending she was your sister that had married a Duitscher drummer in Gueldersdorp, and buried him, and was afraid to be shut up in the stad with all those lustful rooineks, you thought it would be enough to tell her Staats Police or Transvaal burghers were after her to make her creep into a mousehole and pay you to keep her hid.
She would evacuate it, when he could manage to get hold of Nixey's mouse-coloured trotter and the spider, left in the care of Van Busch's good friend Bough, at Haargrond Plaats. A dash for freedom then. "Speshul. Hextry Speshul!"
The Binnenhof, the square to the west, called the Bintenhof, and another square beyond the marsh, called the Plaats, into which you enter by an old gate that once formed part of a prison, were the theaters of the most sanguinary events in the history of Holland.
And verily he reaped his reward, in an officially countersigned railway pass, which would enable the patriot to render some further services to British arms, and a great many more to Van Busch, of Johannesburg. He had his knavish headquarters still at the Border homestead known as Haargrond Plaats. Something drew him back to the place, and kept on drawing him.
The slatternly Dutchwoman and the coloured man who had charge of the Plaats were too surely his creatures to betray Bough Van Busch. "Let the dogs smell around the place," he thought, when by the sounds that reached him in his hiding-place he knew the Advance had halted. "They'll tire of the game before they smell out me!"
A gloomy archway, surmounted by windows grimly guarded by iron lattice-work, forms the general thoroughfare from the aristocratic Plaats and Kneuterdyk and Vyverberg to the inner court of the ancient palace. The cells within are dark, noisome, and dimly lighted, and even to this day the very instruments of torture, used in the trials of these and other prisoners, may be seen by the curious.
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