ead English traveller.

Seventeen hundred pounds, hard cash--a pretty windfall for an honest man.
The honest man whistled softly, handling the white crackling notes, and
feeling the smooth, heavy English sovereigns slip between his fingers.

There were certificates of Rand stock, also a goodly number of Colonial
Railway shares, and some foreign bonds, all of which could be realised on,
but at a distance, and by a skilled hand. There were jewels, as the Boer
waggon-driver had said, that had belonged to the dead woman--diamond
rings, and a bracelet or two; and there were silk dresses of lovely hues
and texture, and cambric and linen dresses, and tweed dresses, in the
trunks; and a great cloak of sables, trimmed with many tails, and
beautiful underclothing of silk and linen, trimmed with real lace, over
which the mouth of the woman of the tavern watered. She got some of the
dresses and all the undergarments when Bough had dexterously picked out
the embroidered initials. He knew diamonds and rubies, but he had never
been a judge of lace.

There was a coronet upon one or two handkerchiefs that had been overlooked
when the dead woman had burned the others four years previously. Bough
picked this out too, working deftly with a needle.

He was clever, very clever. He could take to pieces a steam-engine or a
watch, and put it together again. He knew all there is to know about
locks, and how they may best be opened without their keys. He could alter
plate-marks with graving tools and the jeweller's blow-pipe, and test
metals with acids, and make plaster-cast moulds that would turn out
dollars and other coins, remarkably like the real thing. He was not a
clever forger; he had learned to write somewhat late in life, and the
large, bold round hand, with the capital letters that invariably began
with the wrong quirk or twirl, was too characteristic, though he wrote
anonymous letters sometimes, risking detection in the enjoyment of what
was to him a dear delight, only smaller than that other pleasure of
moulding bodies to his own purposes, of malice, or gain, or lust.

IV

There was a child in the tavern on the veld; it lay in an old orange-box,
half-filled with shavings, covered with a thin, worn blanket, in the
daub-and-wattle outhouse, where the Hottentot woman, called the
chambermaid, and the Kaffir woman, who was cook, slept together on one
filthy pallet. Sometimes they stayed up at the tavern, drinking and
carousin