fectly familiar:

"Your Baas has gone in, as my wife and I expected."

Smoots Beste growled in his throat:

"He was no Baas of mine, the verdoemte rooinek! I drove for him for pay,
that is all. There is wage owing me still, for the matter of that--and
where am I to get it now that the heathen has gone to the burning?"

Smoots, who was all of a heathen himself, and regularly got drunk, not
only on week days, but on Sabbaths, felt virtuously certain that the
Englishman had gone to Hell.

Bough smiled and poured out a four-finger swig of bad Cape brandy, and
pushed it across the counter.

"You shall get the money, every tikkie. Only listen to me."

Smoots Beste tossed off the fiery liquid, and returned in a tone less
surly:

"I am listening, Baas."

Said Bough, speaking with the thickish lisp and slurring of the consonants
that distinguished his utterance when he sought to appear more simple and
candid than usual:

"This dead toff, with his flash waggon and fine team, and Winchester
repeating-rifles, had very little money. He has died in my debt for the
room and the nursing, and the good nourishment, for which I trusted him
all these three weeks, and I am a poor man. The dollars I have paid you
and the Kaffir and the Cape boys on his account came out of my own pocket.
Rotten soft have I behaved over him, that's the God's truth, and when I
shall get back my own there's no knowing. But, of course, I shall act
square."

The Boer's thick lips parted in a grin, showing his dirty, greenish-yellow
teeth. He scratched his shaggy head, and said, his tongue lubricated to
incautiousness by the potent liquor:

"The waggons, and the oxen, and the guns and ammunition, and the stores in
the second waggon are worth good money. And the woman that is dead had
jewels--I have seen them on her--diamonds and rubies in rings and
bracelets fit for the vrouw of King Solomon himself. The Englishman did
not bury them with her under that verdoemte kopje that he built with his
two hands, and they are not in the boxes in the living-waggon."

"Did he not?" asked Bough, looking the Boer driver full in the face with a
pleasant smile. "Are they not?"

Smoots Beste's piggish eyes twinkled round the bar-room, looked up at the
ceiling, down at the floor, anywhere but into Bough's. He spat, and said
in a much more docile tone:

"What do you want me to do?"

Bough leaned over the counter, and said confidentially:

"Just this, friend. I wan