t the oblong cairn of ironstone
boulders in the middle of the sandy patch of ground enclosed with zinc
wire-netting. At the foot of the cairn was a new grave.

For the lover did not even lie beside his beloved, as he had vowed once,
promised and planned, but couched below her feet, waiting, like some
faithful hound that could not live without the touch of the worshipped
hand, for the dead to rise again.

Why is it that Failure is the inevitable fate of some men and women?
Despite brilliant prospects, positions that seem assured, commanding
talents nobly used, splendid opportunities that are multiplied as though
in mockery, the result is Nothing from first to last; while the bad
flourish and the evil prosper, and the world honours the stealer of the
fruit of the brains that have been scattered in frenzied despair, or have
become so worn out from the constant effort of creation that the worker
has sunk into hopeless apathy and died.

Bough was not one of those men whose plans come to nothing. He had
prospered as a rogue of old in England, really his native country, though
he called himself an Afrikander. Reared in the gutters of the Irish
quarter of Liverpool, he had early learned to pilfer for a living, had
prospered in prison as sharp young gaol-birds may prosper, and returned to
it again and again, until, having served out part of a sentence for
burglary and obtained his ticket-of-leave, he had shifted his convict's
skin, and made his way out to Cape Colony under a false name and
character. He had made a mistake, it was true, enlisting as a trooper of
Colonial Police, but the step had been forced upon him by circumstances.
Then he had deserted, and had since been successful as a white-slave
dealer at Port Elizabeth, and as a gold-miner in the Transvaal, and he had
done better and better still at that ticklish trade of gun-running for Oom
Paul. Though, get caught--only once get caught--and the Imperial
Government authorities, under whose noses you had been playing the game
with impunity for years, made it as hot as Hell for you. Bough, however,
did not mean ever to get caught. There was always another man, a
semi-innocent dupe, who would appear to have been responsible for
everything, and who would get pinched.

Such a dupe now trudged at the head of the meagre three-span ox-team.
When, after a hard day's toil, he at length outspanned, the waggon-pole
still faithfully pointed to the north-west. But before it was yet