Richard Dehan - The Dop Doctor

He called for ink and paper as soon as the house was awake, and with infinite labour and many pauses to recover spent strength and breath, for he was greedy of life now, for the reason that we know – he wrote a letter home to England, to a relative who was the head of his family, and bore a great historic title – so great that those who spelled it out upon the envelope were half afraid to slip the heated knife under the crested seal. But Bough did it, and opened, and read.

It was not going to be the soft snap he had thought, but it would be good enough. Wires might be pulled from Downing Street that would set the Government at Cape Town working to trace the tall thin Englishman who had travelled up with two waggons from Cape Colony in the company of a child and the woman now dead, and for whose sake he had given up those almighty swell 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 of the inhabitants of the Gold-Reef Town in the event of an attack by a hostile force.

Also the military armament of the place was about to be materially increased.

And yet up to the little frontier town upon which so much depended not a single modern gun had been despatched.

An easy prey had the little town upon the flat-topped hill, set in the middle of a basin, proved to the Boer General and his commandos but for one thing. For weeks after the bursting of the first shell over Gueldersdorp three sides of the beleaguered town were so many open doors for the enemy. Only upon the threshold of each door stood Fear, and guarded and held the citadel.

That hard taskmaster, Satan, is sometimes wonderfully indulgent to those who serve him well. While Bough, the keeper of the tavern, was yet turning about the open letter in his thick, short, hairy hands, weighing the chances attending the sending of it against the chances of keeping it back, the woman who served as mistress of the place thrust her coarsely-waved head of yellow bleached hair and rouge-ruddled face in at the room door, and called to him:

"Boss, the sick toff is doing a croak. Giving up the ghost for all he's worth – he is. Better come and take a look for yourself if you don't believe me."

Bough swore with relief and surprise, delayed only to lock away the letter, and went to take a look. It was as he hoped, a real stroke of luck for a man who knew how to work it.

Richard Mildare – for Bough knew now what had been the name of the Englishman: Captain the Hon. Richard Mildare, late of the Grey Hussars – was dead. No hand made murderous by the lust of gold had helped him to his death. Sudden failure of the heart is common in aggravated cases of rheumatic fever, and with one suffocating struggle, one brief final pang, he had gone to join her he loved. But his dead face did not look at rest. There was some reflection in it of the terror that had come upon him in the watches of that last night.

Bough stayed some time alone in the room of death. When he came out he was extremely affable and gentle. The woman, who knew him, chuckled to herself when he met the Kaffir serving-maid bringing back the child from an airing in the sun, and told her to take it to the mistress. Then he went into the bar-room to speak to the Englishman's Boer driver.

Leaning easily upon the zinc-covered counter he spoke to the man in the Taal, with which he was perfectly 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?"