well connections. What a fool--what a thundering, juicy, damned fool the
man had been! whose gaunt eyes were even now making out the landfall of
Kingdom Come through the gathering mists of death.

The letter worried Bough. To have the English Government smelling at your
heels is no joke, thought he. Any moment the mastiff may grip, and then,
if you happen to be an ex-convict and deserter from their Colonial Police,
and supposing you have one or two other little things against you ... the
most honest of speculators being occasionally compelled to dirty his
hands, if only to tone down those immaculate extremities to something
approaching the colour of other people's--then what becomes of the risky
but profitable business of gun-running from the English ports through to
the Transvaal?

For by men like Bough and his associates vast supplies of munitions and
engines of war were wormed through. The machine-guns in carefully numbered
parts came in cases as "agricultural implements," the big guns travelled
in the boilers of locomotives, the empty cases of the shells, large and
small, were packed in piano-cases, or in straw-filled crates as
"hardware"; the black powder and the cordite and the lyddite came in round
wooden American cheese-boxes, with a special mark; and the Mauser
cartridges were soldered in tins like preserved meat. How handsomely that
business paid only Bough and his merry men, and Oom Paul and his burghers
of the Volksraad, knew.

But Her Majesty's Government, bound about with red-tape, hoodwinked by
Dutch Assistant-Commissioners of British Colonies, and deceived by
traitorous English officials, were blind and deaf to the huge traffic in
arms and munitions. Not that there were no warnings. To the very end they
were shouted in deaf ears.

What of that letter sent from the Resident Commissioner's office at
Gueldersdorp, that little frontier hamlet on the north-east corner of
British Baraland, September 4, 1899, little more than a month before the
war broke out, the war that was to leave Britain and her Colonies bleeding
at every vein?

The Boers were in laager over the Border. A desperate appeal for help had
been made to the Powers that were, and the reply received to the now
historic telegram, through the Resident Commissioner, has equally become a
matter of history.

"All that was possible" was being done by the Imperial authorities, His
Excellency assured the inquirer, to safeguard the lives and property