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The patriot to whom he referred, mounted on an attenuated mule, and escorted by a Sergeant and six men of the B.S.A., under the superintendence of a large pink officer of the Staff, was at that moment being conducted at a sharp trot out of the lines, to meet a smallish waggon pulled by a span of four that was being brought down from Tweipans by half a dozen Boers in weathered tan-cord and velveteen, battered pot-hats and ragged shooting-jackets, carrying very carefully-tended rifles, mounted on well-fed, wiry little horses, and accompanied by a White Flag.
Except for the gnawing, prowling dogs, the pickets at either end of it, and the sentries posted at longish intervals all down its length, the street of new brick and tin, and old wooden houses that made Tweipans, belonged to Lady Hannah then.
"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.
"The first was brought in by a native boy who said he belonged to the kraals at Tweipans," says the Chief. "Boiled small and stuffed into a quill stuck through his ear in the usual way. He trumped up a glib story about his cow having been killed and his new wife beaten by Brounckers' men, and his desire to be revenged, and oblige the English lady who'd been kind to him " "Umph!
I have had them read to me, and the people who make them should be shot. Hear you now. You shall write to them and say: 'Selig Brounckers is a merciful man and a just. He is not as zwart as he is painted. He caught me mousing round his hoofd laager at Tweipans and what does he do?" The pause was impressive.
Women are so dashed fond of play-actin'! Kids, Saxham, that's what they are in their weakness for dressin' up and makin'-believe! And my wife " The large Major was in a violent lather as he ran the thick finger round inside his collar, and swallowed at the lump in his throat. " My wife saw Van Busch at Kink's hotel at Tweipans from time to time.
And every morning, after Mevrouw Kink had brought in coffee, snorting whenever Trudi's hair caught her virtuous eye, or whenever the German drummer's widow struck her as being more foreign of manners and appearance than usual, Lady Hannah would call for her boots, attire herself as for a promenade outdoors, lift the corner of a blind, steal a glance at the seething, stenching single street of Tweipans between the slats of the green shutters, and unpin her veil and take off her hat without a word....
The Major coughed, and went on: "My wife came across that man at Tweipans under curious circumstances, which I'm here to put before you as plainly as may be.... She'd met him before the Siege, travelling up from Cape Town. He scraped acquaintance, called himself a loyal Johannesburger, and an Agent of the British South African War-Intelligence-Bureau. Not that there ever was such a Bureau."
The German drummer's refugee-widow, who lived behind two green-shuttered, blinded windows at Kink's Hotel, and was a sister of that good Boer Mijnheer Hendryk Van Busch "a sister indeed!" snorted Mevrouw Kink; and never went to the kerk-praying, or put her nose out of doors at all before dark, and had a maid who did her hair, and wore her own in waves, the impudent wench! and whose portmanteau, and bag, and boots, and shoes, and skirt-bands, had fashionable London tradesmen's labels inside them, was the only person in the village of Tweipans and for a mile round it good Nederlands measure who did not know that she was an English prisoner-of-war.
Lady Hannah knew an immense yearning for the absent Bingo, husband of limited intellectual capacity, man of superior muscular development, doughty in the use of that primitive weapon of punishment, the doubled human fist. "In useful time? Useful Gueldersdorp time or useful Tweipans time? That is what I want to get at." "Oh, hell! how do I know?"
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