The rudeness of the other’s words and manner angered Colvin, but he yielded to the expediency of restraining too great a manifestation of resentment.
“Look, Mynheer Commandant,” he said. “I have been courteously received by His Honour the President, I can call Andries Botma my friend and Piet Plessis’”—and he named half a dozen other prominent Transvaal officers—“but it has remained to me to return here to be called a liar by a man of whom I never heard before.”
“All Englishmen are liars,” interpolated a grim old burgher on the opposite side of the tent, spitting on the ground. Schoeman, however, received the reply with a wooden-faced silence. But Colvin did not miss a look of dismay and warning darted at him by Morkel, and at the same time, with anything but satisfaction, he realised that he had probably made a deadly enemy of the Commandant.
“Well then,” he continued, “the whole square truth of the matter is that Andries Botma particularly urged upon me not to talk of what I had seen with Cronje’s force, not even on this side of the river. Does that satisfy all here?” And he looked around the circle.
“Ja, ja,” assented most of them, Swaart Jan adding:
“It is true, Commandant Colvin is a true man. I know him. He is a friend of ‘The Patriot’. Besides, he is one of us now. He is going to marry Stephanus De la Rey’s daughter.”
“Quite right, Oom Jan,” said Colvin, with alacrity. Then, judging that this was exactly the moment for preferring his request, he represented to the Commandant that it was while on his way to Ratels Hoek that he had been detained and brought here. Might he not now proceed thither?
This request was backed up by most of the assembled Boers. Schoeman, beginning to think it would save trouble, was inclined to yield, when a contretemps occurred, one of those freaks of fate which have an impish and arbitrary way of skipping forward just at the right moment to divert and ruin the course of human affairs when such course is beginning to run smoothly. A considerable hubbub had arisen outside; curses and threats in Dutch and English, with the sound of scuffling, and, over and above all, a voice lifted in song, bellowing stentoriously, if somewhat jerkily:
“Ta-ra-ra-ra Boomdeay!
Oom Paul op een vark gerij,
Af hij val en rier gekrij,
Toen klim op en weg gerij.”
The concluding words were hurled, so to say, right into the tent, for a group of burghers had appeared, and in their midst was the singer. The latter was receiving somewhat rough usage—though, truth to tell, he was bringing it upon himself. His arms were tightly pinioned to his sides with a long coil of reim, and he was being hustled forward with varying degrees of roughness. But the more they hustled and cursed him the more defiantly he shouted his idiotic and, under the circumstances, insulting doggerel. Colvin, with dismay and consternation, had recognised the stuff and had recognised the singer, and, even before the latter had been dragged into sight, knew that it could be no other than Frank Wenlock. So this was the obstreperous prisoner? Well, Frank Wenlock could be pretty obstreperous, as he knew by experience.