"When—where?" Stafford inquired, his eye holding the other's.
"At Hetmeyer's Kopje."
"But what are you—a prisoner—doing here at Brinkwort's Farm?"
"I was hurt. They take me hospital, but the Baas, he send for me."
"They let you come without a guard?"
"No—not. They are outside"—Krool jerked a finger towards the rear of the house—"with the biltong and the dop."
"You are a liar, Krool. There may be biltong, but there is no dop."
"What matters!" Krool's face had a leer. He looked impudently at Stafford, and Stafford read the meaning behind the unveiled insolence: Krool knew what no one else but Jasmine and himself knew with absolute certainty. Krool was in his own country, more than half a savage, with the lust of war in his blood, with memories of a day in Park Lane when the sjambok had done its ugly work, and Ian Stafford had, as Krool believed, placed it in the hands of the Baas.
It might be that this dark spirit, this Nibelung of the tragedy of the House of Byng, would even yet, when the way was open to a reconstructed life for Jasmine and Rudyard, bring catastrophe.
The thought sickened him, and then black anger took possession of him. The look he cast on the bent figure before him in the threadbare frock-coat which had been taken from the back of some dead Boer, with the corded breeches stuck in boots too large for him, and the khaki hat which some vanished Tommy would never wear again, was resolute and vengeful.