Chapter Fourteen.
An Interview with Uncle Paul.
It was a respectable and fair-sized house of the ordinary colonial fashion, with a broad covered verandah in front, and fine shady trees inside the rails—a comfortable and homely place, with nothing special about it to denote the character or position of its owner, except those two heavily armed sentinels at the gate.
Yet our heroes shivered slightly at the thought of the coming interview, and wished they could have put it off.
They were not frightened physically of this avowed and relentless enemy of their countrymen. Whatever he might sentence them to, they were prepared to meet and endure bravely.
It was his craft that they dreaded, lest he should by some devilish artifice lure them into a trap, and so get something out of them which would hurt their friends. They were frightened of themselves, not of this wily and ferocious Boer of Boers.
They were going to be sounded by the man who had been able to deceive and outwit the smartest British diplomatists, and instinctively they felt how powerless they would be in his hands.
That they were taken before him, prior to their examination by the landdrost, was a sign that he suspected them of being in the possession of some secret, which he would do his best to worm out of them. His scowls and threats they could defy, but his preternatural cunning they trembled to think about.