e 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'