In the Name of the People

by Arthur W. Marchmont

He appeared to be urging her to do something and his eyes were insistent, compelling and passionate. There was no doubt that he felt for her all the animal love of which such a man is capable.

But there was no answering light in her eyes. She was passive, cold and indifferent; and the emotion he stirred was more like fear than anything.

Instinctively I hated the man and felt an unholy glow of gladness at the thought that at a word from me any hold or influence he could have over her would snap like a rotten twig.

My thoughts slipped back to that old time in South Africa; and in place of the swaggering major of cavalry, with his breast covered with orders, I saw him as I had seen him there, a broken-down tatter-de-mallion member of the hungry brigade at Koomarte Port; general sponge, reputed spy and acknowledged rascal, passing as a Frenchman under the name of Jean Dufoire; one of the many scamps who infested the border between the Transvaal and the Portuguese Colony, ripe for any scoundrelism from theft to throat-slitting.

This was the story I knew about him. When old Kruger was bundling off his private fortune to Europe, this Dufoire managed to get hold of some secret information about one of the consignments and joined with three other men to steal it. They were successful. The two men in charge of it were found murdered; and the money, said to be nearly £50,000, was missing.

But that was not all. Not content with a share of the loot, Dufoire first picked a quarrel with one of his companions and shot him treacherously, and then cheated the other two of the greater part of the money and disappeared.

The facts came out when the two men were afterwards captured. One of them died; and just before his death confessed everything, in the hope that the British would take the matter up and secure Dufoire’s punishment. Many men were aware that I knew Dufoire by sight; and when the war was over and I was leaving Capetown for home, the other scamp, a Corsican named Lucien Prelot, sought me out to get news of him. He swore by all the saints in the calendar that if he could ever find Dufoire he would drive a knife between his ribs. He begged me on his knees to let him know if I ever met Dufoire again; and vowed, Corsican as he was, that he would go from one end of the world to the other in his quest for revenge.

Of course I would not have anything to do with such an affair; but he managed in some way to ferret out my address in England and wrote me two or three letters urging the same request. And then one day he turned up in London to tell me that he had made money on the Rand, that he was in Europe searching for Dufoire, and that he could and would pay me any sum I chose to ask if I would tell him where to find his enemy.

That was about a year before my father’s death; and every month had brought me a letter from him, in the hope that I could send news. These letters were addressed from various parts of Europe where he was pursuing his search, with the deadly intensity of his unslaked and unslakable thirst for revenge.

And while Prelot was hunting for a Frenchman of the name of Jean Dufoire, the scoundrel himself had been strutting it in the Portuguese capital as Francisco Sampayo, major of cavalry. He had purchased his position, of course, with the fortune he had acquired by robbery, bloodshed and treachery; and had found some means to use it to obtain the promise of Miralda’s hand in marriage.