"The Town Guard," according to W. Keyse, Esquire, who kept a Betts'
Journal, one shilling net, including Rail and Ocean Accident Insurance,
was "a kind of amachoor copper, swore in to look after the dorp, stand
guard, and do sentry-go, and tumble to arms, just as the town dogs leave
off barkin', an' the old gal in the room next yours is startin' to snore
like a Kaffir sow."
Later on, even more was asked of the townie, and he rose to the demand.
The smasher hat was not unbecoming to the manly brow it shaded, when W.
Keyse put it on and anxiously consulted the small greenish swing
looking-glass that graced the chest of drawers, the most commanding
article of furniture in his room at Filliter's Boarding-House. It was Mrs.
Filliter who snored in the room on the other side of the thin partition.
Like the immortal Mrs. Todgers, she was harassed by the demands of her
resident gentlemen in connection with gravy; but, unlike Mrs. Todgers, she
never supplied even browned and heated water as an equivalent. And the
mutton was wonderfully lean, and the fowls, but for difference in size,
might have been ostriches, they were so wiry of muscle, especially as
regarded the legs. A time was to come when Mrs. Filliter was to cook
shrapnel-killed mule and exhausted cavalry charger for her gentlemen, and
when they were to bear up better than most sufferers from this tough and
lasting form of diet, because of not having previously been pampered, as
Mrs. Filliter expressed it, with delicacies and kickshaws.
The bandolier was heavy upon the thin shoulders and hollow chest of a pale
young Cockney, who had drifted down from Southampton in the steerage, and
roared and rattled up from Cape Town by the three foot six inch gauge
railway, eight hundred and seventy miles, to Gueldersdorp, that he might
find his crown of manhood waiting there. The second-hand Sam Browne belt
was distinctly good; the yellow puttees, worn with his own brown lace-up
boots, took trouble to adjust. And it was barely possible, even by
standing the small swing looking-glass on the floor, and tilting it
excessively, to see how one's legs looked. W. Keyse suffered from the
conviction that these limbs were over-thin. Behind the counter of a
fried-fish shop in High Street, Camden Town, serving slabs of browned
hake, and skate, and penn'orths of fried eels and chips to the hungry
customers who surge in tempestuously to be fed on their homeward way from
the Oxford or the Camden Hall of Varieties, or the theatre at the junction
of Gower Street and the Hampstead Road--one develops acuteness of
observation, one gains experience, there being always the bloke who cuts
and runs without paying, or eats and shows reversed trouser-pockets in
default of settlement, to deal with.... But one does not develop muscle,
the thing above all that W. Keyse most longed to possess. When he went
into the printing-business and bent all day over the formes of type in the
composing-room, hand-setting up the columns of the North London
_Half-penny Herald_, to the tune of three-and-eightpence a day, the hollow
chest grew hollower, and he developed a "corf." The physician in charge of
the out-patients' department at University College Hospital said there was
lung-trouble, and a man at the printing-office who had never been there,
said South Africa was the cure for that. And W. Keyse had thirty pounds in
the Post-Office Savings Bank, earned by the sweat of a brow which was his
best feature, and the steamships were advertising ten-pound third-class
single fares to Cape Town. One of the Societies for the Aid of Emigrants
would have helped him, but while W. Keyse 'ad a bit of 'is own, no
Blooming Paupery, said he, for him! His sole living relative, an aunt who
inhabited one of a row of ginger-brick Virginia-creeper-clad almshouses
"over aginst 'Ighgyte Cimitery," sniffled a little when he called to say
good-bye, bringing in a parting present of a half-pound of Liphook's
Luscious Tea and a screw of snuff.
"I shan't never see you no more, William."
"Ow yes, you will, mother! Don't be such a silly!" William's step cousin
'Melia, in service as general in Adelaide Road, Chalk Farm end, had said;
and she had looked coldly upon William immediately afterwards, bestowing
an amorous ogle upon Lobster, who sat well forward upon a backless Windsor
chair, sucking the silver top of his swagger cane,--Lobster, who was six
foot high and in the Grenadier Guards, and had supplanted William in
'Melia's affections, for they 'ad used to walk out regularly on Sundays
and holidays before Lobster came along.... How William loved Lobster now!
Why, but for him he might have been married to 'Melia to-day;--doomed to
tread in the ways of commonplace, ordinary married life, fated to live and
die without once having peeped into Paradise, without ever having looked
upon the 'only woman in the world!' Greta, of the glorious golden pigtail,
the entrancing figure and the bewitching, twinkling, teasing eyes of blue!
Suppose--only suppose--the silent threatening Thing across the border,
jewelled with the glowing Argus-eyes of many camp-fires, conjecturable in
dark masses flecked with the white of waggon-tilts, and sometimes giving
out the dull gleam of iron or the sparkle of steel, were to choose this,
W. Keyse's first night on guard, for an attack! Even to the inexperience
of W. K. the sand-bagged earthworks built about Gueldersdorp, the
barricades of trek-waggons and railway-trucks blocking up the roads
debouching on the veld, the extending lines of trenches, the watchdog
forts, the sentinelled pickets, the noiseless, continually moving patrols,
all the various parts of the marvellous machinery of defence, controlled
by one master-hand upon the levers, would count for nothing against that
overwhelming onrush of armed thousands, that flood of men dammed up above
the town, and waiting the signal to roll down and overwhelm her,
and----Cripps! what a chance to make a glorious, heroic splash in Greta's
sight! Die, perhaps, in saving her from them Dutchies. To be sure, she,
divine creature, was a Dutchy too. But no matter--a time would come ...
Confident in the coming of that time, W. Keyse took the brown rifle
tenderly from the corner, and replaced the meagre little looking-glass
upon the yellow chest of drawers. In the act of bestowing a final glance
of scrutiny upon his upper lip, whose manly crop had unaccountably
delayed, he caught sight of a cheap paper-covered book lying beside the
tin candlestick whose tallow dip had aided perusal of the volume o'
nights. The red surged up in his thin cheeks as he picked up the thing.
There were horrible woodcuts in it, coloured with liberal splashes of red
and blue and yellow, and the print contained matter more lurid still. Vice
mopped and mowed and slavered, obscene and hideous, within those gaudy
covers.
He looked round the mean, poor, ugly room, the volume in his hand; a
photograph of the dubious sort leered from the wall beside the bed....
"If they rushed us to-night, an' I got shot in the scrap, an' they brought
me back 'ere, dyin', and She came ... an' saw _that_ ...!" His ears were
scarlet as he dashed at the leering photograph and tore it down. Oh, W.
Keyse, it is pitiful to think you had to blush, but good to know you had
not forgotten how to. There was a little rusty fireplace in the room. W.
Keyse burned something in it that left nothing but a feathery pile of
ashes, and a little shameful heap of mud in the corner of a boy's memory,
before he hurried to the Town Guardhouse, where other bandoliers were
mustering, and fell in. As though the Powers deigned to reward an act of
virtue on the very night of its performance, he was posted by his picket
in the shadow of the high corrugated iron fence of the tree-bordered
tennis-ground behind the Convent, as "Lights Out" sounded from the camp of
the Irregulars, beyond the Railway-sheds and storehouses.
It was glorious to be there, taking care of Her, though it would have been
nicer if one had been allowed to smoke. The moon of William's
passion-inspired verse was not shining o'er South Africa's plain upon this
the very night for her. It was dark and close and stiflingly hot. A
dust-wind had blown that day, and the suspended particles thickened the
atmosphere, to the oppression of the lungs and the hiding of the stars. He
knew his picket posted a quarter of a mile away on the other side of the
Cemetery; his fellow-sentry was on the opposite flank of the Convent. He
was a stout, middle-aged tradesman, with a large wife and a corresponding
family, and it wrung the heart of W. Keyse to think that a tricky fate
might have placed that insensible man on the side where Her window was!
Through the boughs of the peach and orange trees, heavily burdened with
unripe fruit, you could get an occasional glimpse of whitewashed brick
walls, darkened by the outline of shuttered oblongs here and there. And
Imagination could blow her cloud of fragrant vapour, though tobacco were
denied you.
"They're all Her windows while she's there behind them walls," was the
reflection in which W. Keyse found comfort.
She was not there. She was at that moment being kissed on the stoep of the
Du Taine homestead near Johannesburg, by a young officer of Staats
Artillery, to whom she had agreed to be clandestinely engaged, though Papa
Du Taine had other views.
W. Keyse was spared this tragic knowledge. But if the moon, shining
beautifully over the Du Taine gardens and orange-groves, had chosen to
tell tales!
It was still--still and quiet; a blue radiance of electric light burned
here and there; at the Staff Office on the Market Square, and at other
centres of purposeful activity. Aromatic-beer cellars and whisky-saloons
gave out a yellow glare of gas-jets; the red lamp of an apothecary showed
a wakeful eye. Gueldersdorp sprawled in the outline of a sleeping turtle
on her squat hillock of gravelly earth and sand. In smoke-coloured folds,
closely matching the lowering dim canopy of vapour brooding overhead, the
prairie spread about her, deepening to a basined valley in the middle
distances, sweeping to a rise beyond, so that the edges of the basin
looked down upon the town. High on the hill-ranges in the South more
chains of red sparks burned ... he knew them for the watch-fires of the
Boer outposts, and the raised edges of the basin East and West were set
thickly with similar twinkling jewels where the laagers were; while
smaller groups shone nearer, marking the situation of isolated vedettes.
The sickly taint upon the faint breeze told of massed and clustered
humanity. 'Strewth, how they stunk, the brutes! He hoped there was enough
of 'em, lying doggo up there, waiting the word to roll down and swallow
the blooming dorp! His palate grew dry, as the sweat broke out upon his
temples and trickled down the back of his neck, and the palms of his hands
were moist and clammy. Also, under the buckle of the Sam Browne belt was a
sinking, all-gone sensation excessively unpleasant to feel. Perhaps its
wearer had a touch of fever! Then the stout tradesman on the other side of
the Convent sneezed suddenly, and W. Keyse, with every nerve in his body
jarring from the shock, knew that he was simply suffering from funk.
Staggering from the shock of the horrible self-revelation, he gritted his
teeth. There was a Billy Keyse who was a blooming coward inside the other
who was not. He told the sickening, white-gilled little skulker what he
thought of him. He only wished--that is, one of him only wished--that a
gang of the Dutchies would come along now!
He drew a lurid picture for the benefit of the trembler, and when the
young soldier had fired into the brown of them and seen the whites of
their eyes, and fallen, pierced by a hundred wounds, in the successful
defence of the Convent, he was carried in, and laid on a sofa, and nobody
could recognise him, along of all the blood, until She came, with her
white little feet peeping from the hem of a snowy nightgown, and her
unbraided pigtail swamping the white with gold, and knew that it was her
lover, and knelt by the hero's side. Soft music from the Orchestra,
please! as with his final breath W. Keyse implores a last, first kiss.
Even as William No. 1 thrilled to the rapture of that imagined osculation,
Billy No. 2 experienced a ghastly fright.
For out of the enfolding velvety darkness ahead of him, and looking
towards those firefly sparks shining on the heights, came the sound of
stealthy measured footsteps and muffled voices talking Dutch. The enemy
had made a sortie. The defences had been rushed, the town surrounded! Yet
there were only two of them--a big, slouching villain and a short thin
one, who wore a giant hat. The chirping sound of a kiss damped the fierce
martial ardour of William, and greatly reassured Billy. It was only a
townsman taking a night walk with his girl!
Crushed and discouraged, W. Keyse relaxed his grip upon the trusty rifle,
and slunk back into the shadow, as the tall and the short figures halted
at the angle of the fence.
"'Ain't it a 'eavenly night?" came from the short figure, who leaned
against the tall one affectionately. "An' me got to go in. A crooil shyme,
I call it. 'Ain't it, deer? Leggo me wyste, there's a love. You've no
notion 'ow I shall cop it for bein' lyte."
He sportively declined to release her. There was the sound of a soft slap,
followed by the smack of a kiss. She was very angry.
"Leggo, I tell you! Where's your manners, 'orlin' me abart! If that's the
way you be'ayve with your Dutch ones ...!"
He spat and asseverated:
"Neen! I no other girls but you heb got."
It was the Slabberts with Emigration Jane.
"Ho! So you _can_ talk English a bit--give you a charnce?"
"Ja, a little now and then when it is useful. But when we are to be
married, you shall only to me talk in my own moder Taal."
"Shan't I myke a gay old 'ash of it!" Recklessly she crushed the large hat
against the unwieldy shoulder. "There, good-night agyne, deer! Sister
Tobias--that's what they call the one that 'ousekeeps and manages the
kitchen--Sister Tobias 'll be sittin' up for me, thinkin' I've got meself
lost or bin run away with." She gurgled enjoyingly.
"Tell me again, before you shall go, about the Engelsch Commandant who
came to visit at the Convent to-day?"
"Lor! 'Aven't I told you a'ready? 'E stopped 'arf an 'our or more ... an'
She--that's the Reverend Mother, as they call her--She took 'im over the
'ouse, an' after 'e'd gone through the 'ouse, an' Sister Tobias--ain't
that a rummy name for a nun?--Sister Tobias, she showed 'im to the gyte,
an' 'e says to 'er as wot 'e's goin' to 'ave the flagstaff rigged up in
the gardin fust thing to-morrow mornin', an' 'e'll undertake that the
workin'-party detached for the purpose will know 'ow to be'ayve
theirselves respectful. An' then 'e touches 'is 'at an' gets on 'is 'orse
an' ..."
"Listen to me." The Slabbertian command of that barbaric language of the
Englanders evoked her surprise, but the painful squeeze he gave her arm
compelled attention. "Next time the English Commandant to the house shall
come, you to listen at the keyhole is."
"Wot for?"
"For what have you before at keyholes listened, little fool?"
"To find out when they was goin' to sack me, so's to git me own notice in
fust--see? Then you can say to the lydy at the Registry Office--and don't
they give theirselves hairs!--as wot you're leaving because the place
don't suit. Twiggy?"
"You for yourself did listen, then. Goed. Now it is for me you listen
will, if you a true Boer's vrouw wish to become by-and-by."
She rose to the immemorial allure that is never out of season in angling
for her simple kind.
"That word you said means--wife, don't it, deer?" Her voice trembled; the
joyous, longed-for haven of marriage--was it possible that it might be in
sight?
"It shall mean wife, if you obey me--ja!--otherwise it will be that I
shall marry the daughter of a good countryman of mine, who many sheep has,
and much land, and plenty of money to give his daughter when she a husband
gets!"
Her underlip dropped pitifully, and the tears welled up. It was too dark
to see her crying, but he heard her sob, and grinned, himself unseen.
"I'll do anything for you, deer! Only don't tyke an' 'ave the other One.
She may be a Dutchy, but she won't never care for you like wot I do. Don't
you know it, Walt?"
"I shall it know when I hear what you have found out," proclaimed the
Slabberts grimly.
There was a boiling W. Keyse in the deep shadow of the tall
corrugated-iron fence, who restrained with difficulty a snort of
indignation.
"On'y tell me, deer. I'll find out anythink you want me to." Before her
spread a lovely vista of floors--her own floors--to scrub, and a kitchen
range--hers, too--which should cook dinners nice enough to make any
husband adore you.
"You shall for me find out what that Commandant of the rooineks is up to
under his Flag of the Red Cross."
"He didn't say nothink about no Red Cross, darlin'."
"Stilte! They will the Red Cross Flag hoist, I tell you, and it will
cover more than a parcel of nuns and schoolgirls. That Commandant is so
verdoemte slim! Tell me, do you cartridges well know when you shall see
them? Little brown rolls with at one end a copper cap--and at the other a
bullet. And gunpowder--you have that seen also?"
She quavered.
"Yes; but you don't want me to touch the narsty, dreadful stuff, do you,
Walty deer?"
He scoffed.
"Afraid of gunpowder, Meisje, that like a whey-blooded Engelschwoman is. A
true Boer's daughter would know how to load a gun, look you, and shoot a
man--many men--if for the help of the Republic it should be! But you will
learn. Watch out, I tell you, for stores that Commandant will be sending
into the Convent. Square boxes and long boxes, and cases--some of them
heavy as if lined with iron; painted black with white letters, and others
stone-colour with black letters, and yet others grey with red letters; the
letters remember--'A.O.S.'"
"But wot'll be in the boxes, deer?"
His English, conned from recently published Imperial Army Service manuals,
grew severely technical:
"If you could their big screws unscrew, and their big locks unlock, you
would see, but you will not be able. What in them? Cakes! Black, square
cakes, with in them holes; and grey, square cakes, and red cakes, light
and crumbly, that dog-biscuits resemble; and long brown sticks, like
peppermint-candy, in bundles tied together with string and paper. Boxes of
stuff like the hair of horse, and packets of evil little electric
detonators in tubes of copper. Alamachtig! who knows what he has not
got--that Engelsch Commandant--both in the dorp and hidden in those
thrice-accursed mines that he has laid on the veld about her. Prismatic
powder and gun-cotton, dynamite and cordite enough to blow a dozen
commandos of honest Booren into dust--a small, fine dust of bones and
flesh that shall afterwards fall mingled with rain of blood. For I tell
you that man has the wickedness of the duyvel in him, and the cunning of
an old baboon!"
She babbled:
"'Ow pretty you talk English when you want to, Walty deer! 'Aven't you
bin gittin' at me all along, makin' out ..."
He swore at her savagely, and she held her tongue, worshipping this new
development of masterful brutality in a man whom she had regarded as a
"big softy."
He went on:
"Now you shall know what to look for, and when the verdoemte explosives
come, you will know them by the boxes and the letters 'A.O.S.'--and you
will tell me--and the guns of our Staats Artillery will not shoot that
way, for the sake of the little woman who is going to be a true Boer's
vrouw by-and-by."
She threw her arms about his rascally neck, and laid her head upon his
hulking shoulder, regardless of the hat she wrecked, and cried in ecstasy:
"I'll do it, deer! I'll do it, Walty! But why should there be any
shootin', lovey? At 'Ome I never could abear to see them theayter plays
what 'ad guns an' firin' in 'em; it made me 'art beat so crooil bad."
He grinned over the big hat into the darkness.
"All right! I will tell the men with the guns that you do not like to hear
them, and they will not perhaps shoot at all. But you will look out for
the boxes with the dynamite, and send me the message when it comes?"
"Course I will, deer! But 'ow am I to send the message?"
The shadowy right arm of Slabberts swept out, taking in the black and void
and formless veld with a large free gesture.
"Out to there. Stand in this place when it becomes dark, looking east.
Straight in front of us is east. The game is great fun, and very easy.
Strike a match, and count to ten before you blow it out, and you shall not
have done that three times before you shall see him answer."
"But oo's 'im?"
"He is my friend--out there upon the veld."
"Lor! but where'll you be? Didn't you say as I'd be talkin' to you? I
don't 'arf fancy wot you calls the gyme, not if I 'ave to play it with a
strynge bloke!"
The answer came, accompanied by a scraping, familiar sound.
The Slabberts was striking a match of the fizzling, spluttering,
Swedish-made non-safety kind, known to W. Keyse and his circle by the
familiar abbreviation of "stinkers."
"Voor den donder! Have I not told you I shall be there with him--after
to-night!"
Her womanly tenderness quickened at the hint of coming separation. She
clung fondly to his arm, and the match went out, extinguished by a
maiden's sigh. He shook her roughly off, and struck another.
"I shall go away--ja--and here is the only way for you to reach me!"
As the fresh match glimmered blue, he held it at arm's length in front of
him, counting silently up to ten, then blew it out, and set his heavy boot
upon the faintly-glowing spark, and did the thing again.
Endeavouring not to breathe so as to be heard, W. Keyse flattened himself
against the corrugated fence, and waited, looking ahead into the thick
velvet darkness, sensing the faint human taint upon the tell-tale breeze,
and counting with the Slabberts; and then, out in the blackness that
concealed so much that was sinister, sprang into sudden life an answering
bluish glimmer, and lasted for ten beats of the pulse, and went out as
suddenly as though a human breath had blown upon it.
"Is that your pal?" she whispered.
"That is my pal now." He struck another match, and flared it, and screened
it with his big hand, and showed the light again, and repeated the
manoeuvre three times. "That is my pal now--and I have said to him 'No
news to-night'; but to-morrow night and the night after, and so on for
many nights to come, I shall be out there where he is, and after you have
called me and I have answered, just as he has done, you will tell me what
there is to tell. Can you spell your language?"
"Pretty middlin', Walty deer, though not as I could wish, owin' to me
'avin' to leave Board School in the Fif' Stannard when father sold up the
'ome in drink after mother went orf wiv the young man lodger. Some'ow, try
all I could, I never ..."
"Hou jou smoel! With our Boer people, when men speak, the women listen;
but you English ones chatter and chatter! Remember that this match-talk
goes thus: For the letter A one flare, and hide the light as you saw me
do just now. For B, two flares, and hide the light; for C, three, and
hide; for D, four, and hide; and so on ... It is slow, of course, and
matches will blow out when you do not want them to, and a cycle-lamp or a
candle-lantern would be easier to deal with, but for the verdoemte
patrols. Do you understand? Say now what I say, after me. For the letter A
one flare and hide. For B ..."
He put her through the alphabet from end to end; she laboured faithfully,
and pleased her taskmaster. He grunted approvingly.
"Zeer goed! See that you do not forget. And remember, you are to listen
and watch, and tell me what you hear and see. If you are obedient, I will
marry you--by-and-by."
He gave her a clumsy hug in earnest of endearments to come.
"But if you do not please me"--the grip of his heavy hand bruised her
shoulder through the thin, flowery "blowse"--"I will punish you--yes, by
the Lord! I will marry a fine Boer maiden who is the daughter of a
landrost, and who has got much money and plenty of sheep. And you can give
yourself to any dirty verdoemte schelm of an Engelschman you please, for I
will have none of you! To-morrow you shall have a paper showing you how to
tell me very many things in match-talk, and earn much money to buy
presents for my nice little Boer vrouw. Alamachtig! what is this?"
"This" was the hard, cold, polished business-end of a condemned Martini
poked violently out of the blackness into the Slabbertian thorax.
"Not in such a 'urry by 'arf, you perishin' Dopper," spluttered the
ghastly little man in bandoliers behind the weapon. "Put up them dirty big
'ands o' yours, or, by Cripps! I'll let 'er off, you sneakin',
match-talkin' spy!"
The arms of Slabberts soared as the tongue of Slabberts wagged in
explanation.
"This is assault and battery, Meister, upon a peaceful burgher. You shall
answer to your officer for it, I tell you slap. Voor den donder! Is not a
young man to light his pipe as he talks to a young woman without being
called spy by a verdoemte sentry! Tell him, Jannje, that is all I did
do!"
W. Keyse felt a little awkward, and the rifle was uncommonly heavy. The
Slabberts felt it tremble, and thought about taking his hands down and
reaching for that Colts six-shooter he kept in his hip-pocket. But though
the finger wobbled, it was at the trigger, and Walt was not fond of risks.
"Tell him, Jannje!" he spluttered once more.
She had not needed a second bidding.
As the domestic hen in defence of her chicken will give battle to the
wilde-kat, so Emigration Jane, with ruffled plumage, blazing, defiant
eyes, and shrill objurgations, couched in the vernacular most familiar to
their object, hurled herself upon the enemy.
"You narsty little brute, you! To up and try an' murder my young man. With
your jor about spies! Sauce! I'd perish you, I would, if I was 'im! Off
the fyce o' the earth, an' charnce bein' 'ung for it! Take away that gun,
you silly little imitation sojer--d' you 'eer?"
The weapon was extremely weighty. W. Keyse's arms ached frightfully.
Perspiration trickled into his eyes from under the tilted smasher. He felt
damp and small, and desperately at a loss. And--as though in malice--the
moon looked out from behind a curtain of thick, dim vapour, as he said
with a lordly air:
"You be off, young woman, and don't interfere!"
Gawd! she knew him in spite of the smasher hat. Her rage burst the
flood-gates. She screeched:
"You!... It's you. 'Oo I done a good turn to--an' this is 'ow I gits it
back?" She gasped. "Because you're arter one young woman wot wouldn't be
seen dead in the syme street wi' you ..."
Pierced with the awful thought that the adored one might be listening, W.
Keyse lifted up his voice.
"Sentry.... 'Ere!... Mister!" he cried despairingly, "You on the other
side, can't you hear?"
In vain the call. The stout fellow-townsman of W. Keyse, comfortably
propped in an angle of the opposite fence, the bulk of the Convent and the
width of its garden and tennis-ground being between them, continued to
sleep and snore peacefully and undisturbed.
Emigration Jane continued:
"Because that sly cat wiv the yeller 'air-plait won't 'ear o' you, you try
to git a pore servant-gal's fancy bloke pinched! Yah, greedy! Boo! You
plate-faced, erring-backed, s'rimp-eyed little silly, with your
love-letters an' messages! Wait till I give 'er another o' your
screevin'--that's all!"
"Patrol!" cried W. Keyse in a despairing whimper.
She advanced upon him closer and closer, lashing herself as she came, to
frenzy. How often had W. Keyse seen it outside the big gaudy pubs in the
Tottenham Court Road, and the Britannia, Camden Town! Perhaps the
recollection staring, newly awakened, in the pale, moonlit eyes of the
little perspiring Town Guardsman stung her to equal memory, and provoked
the act. Who can tell? We may only know that she plucked the weapon of
lower-class London from her hat, and jabbed at the pale face viciously,
and heard the victim say "Owch!" as he winced, and knew herself, as her
Slabberts gripped the rifle-barrel, and wrested it with iron strength from
the failing hands of W. Keyse, the equal of those dauntless Boer women who
killed men when it was necessary. But, oh! the 'orrible, 'ideous feeling
of 'aving stuck something into live flesh! Sick and giddy, the heroine
shut her eyes, seeing behind their lids wondrous phantasmagoria of
coloured pyrotechny, rivalling the most marvellous triumphs of the
magician Brock....
W. Keyse's beheld, at the moment when his weapon was wrenched from him,
two long grey arms come out of the darkness and coil about the
largely-looming form of Slabberts. Enveloped in the neutral-tinted
tentacles of this mysterious embrace, the big Boer struggled impotently,
and a quick, imperative voice said, between the thick pants of striving
men:
"Get the gun from him, will you, and call up your picket. Don't fire; blow
your whistle instead!"
"_Pip-ip-ip-'r'r! Pip-ip-r'r!_"
The long, shrill call brought armed men hurrying out of the darkness on
the other side of the Cemetery, and considerably quickened the arrival of
the visiting patrol.
"Communicating with persons outside the defences by flashlight signals. We
can't shoot him for it just yet, but we _can_ gaol him on suspicion,"
said the Commander of the picket. And Slabberts, with a stalwart escort of
B.S.A. troopers, reluctantly moved off in the direction of the
guard-house.
"Who was the fellow who helped you, do you know?" asked the officer who
had ridden up with the patrol. "Threw him and sat on him until the picket
came up, you say," he commented, on hearing W. Keyse's version of the
story. "A tall man in civilian clothes, with a dark wideawake and short
pointed beard! H'm!"
"Coming from the veld, apparently, and not from town," said the picket
Commander. "Must have known the countersign, or the sentries out there
would have stopped him. I--see!"
He looked at the patrol-officer, who coughed again. The moonlight was
quite bright enough for the exchange of a wink. Then:
"Hold on, man, you're bleeding," said W. Keyse's Sergeant, an old Naval
Brigade man. "How did ye get that 'ere nasty prod under the eye?"
W. Keyse put up his hand, and gingerly felt the place that hurt. His
fingers were red when they came away.
"The young woman wot was with the Dutchman, she jabbed me with a 'at-pin,
to git me to let 'im go."
"There's a blindin' vixen for you!" commented the Sergeant. "Two inch
higher, and she'd have doused your light out. Where did she come from,
d'ye know?"
"Have you any idea who she was?" asked the Commander of the picket.
W. Keyse shook his head.
"'Aven't the least idear, sir. Never sor 'er before in my natural!" he
declared stoutly.
"Well, you'll know her again when you meet her--or she will you," said the
patrol-officer, about to move on, when a deplorable figure came staggering
into the circle, and the rider reined up his horse. "What's this? Hey,
Johnny, where's your gun?"
It was W. Keyse's fellow-sentry from the opposite flank of the Convent.
"And time you turned up, I don't think," commented W. Keyse. "Didn't you
'ear me sing out to you just now?"
"Come, now, what were you up to?" the Sergeant pressed. "Better up an' own
it if you've bin asleep on guard."
The eager faces crowded round. The object of interest and comment, not at
all sympathetic or polite, was a stout, respectable tradesman, with a
large, round, ghastly face, who saluted his officer with a trembling hand.
"I--I have been the victim of an outrage, sir!"
"Sorry to hear it; what's your name?"
"Brooker, sir," volunteered W. Keyse's Corporal. "The other sentry we put
on with Keyse here."
"Mr. Brooker, sir, General Stores, Market Square," babbled the citizen.
"Well, Private Brooker, what have you to say?"
"I have been drugged or hypnotised, sir, and robbed of my gun while in a
state of insensibility, sir--upon my honour as an Alderman and Magistrate
of this borough! Swear me, sir, if you have any doubt of my veracity!" He
flapped his hands like fins, and his bandolier heaved above a labouring
bosom.
The Commander of the picket looked preternaturally grave.
"Very sorry, Private Brooker, but unless the Sergeant has brought his
Testament along, you'll have to give your information in the ordinary way.
So they drugged you or hypnotised you--or both, was it?--and took away
your rifle. Of course you saw it done?"
"No, sir, I did not see it done. When I woke up ..."
"Ah, when you woke up! Please go on."
The crowding faces of B.S.A. men and Town Guardsmen were grinning now. The
patrol-officer was rocking in his saddle.
"When I revived, sir, from the swoon or trance ..."
"Very good, Private Brooker; we'll hear the rest of that in the morning.
Sergeant, relieve these sentries, and bring Private Keyse and the hypnotic
subject before me in the morning. Make this man Brooker a prisoner at
large for the present, and fall in the picket."