Failure is the inevitable fate of some men and women? Despite brilliant prospects, positions that seem assured, commanding talents nobly used, splendid opportunities that are multiplied as though in mockery, the result is Nothing from first to last; while the bad flourish and the evil prosper, and the world honours the stealer of the fruit of the brains that have been scattered in frenzied despair, or have become so worn out from the constant effort of creation that the worker has sunk into hopeless apathy and died.

Bough was not one of those men whose plans come to nothing. He had prospered as a rogue of old in England, really his native country, though he called himself an Afrikander. Reared in the gutters of the Irish quarter of Liverpool, he had early learned to pilfer for a living, had prospered in prison as sharp young gaol-birds may prosper, and returned to it again and again, until, having served out part of a sentence for burglary and obtained his ticket-of-leave, he had shifted his convict's skin, and made his way out to Cape Colony under a false name and character. He had made a mistake, it was true, enlisting as a trooper of Colonial Police, but the step had been forced upon him by circumstances. Then he had deserted, and had since been successful as a white-slave dealer at Port Elizabeth, and as a gold-miner in the Transvaal, and he had done better and better still at that ticklish trade of gun-running for Oom Paul. Though, get caught—only once get caught—and the Imperial Government authorities, under whose noses you had been playing the game with impunity for years, made it as hot as Hell for you. Bough, however, did not mean ever to get caught. There was always another man, a semi-innocent dupe, who would appear to have been responsible for everything, and who would get pinched.

Such a dupe now trudged at the head of the meagre three-span ox-team. When, after a hard day's toil, he at length outspanned, the waggon-pole still faithfully pointed to the north-west. But before it was yet day the waggon began to move again, and it was to the north-east that the waggon-pole pointed thenceforwards, and the letter Bough had given Smoots Beste for the Chief Resident Magistrate at Gueldersdorp was saved from the kindling of the camp-fire by a mere accident.

The cat's-paw could not read, or the illegible, meaningless ink scrawl upon the sheet within the boldly-addressed envelope would have aroused his suspicions at the outset. So well had Bough, that expert in human frailty, understood his subject, that the letter was a bogus letter, a fraud, not elaborate—a mere stage property, nothing more. But yet he gave it in full belief that it would be burned, and that, the boats of Smoots Beste being consumed with it, according to the thick judgment of the said Smoots, it would be as a pillar of fire behind that slim child of the old voortrekkers, hastening his journey north-eastwards. It is typical of the class of Smoots that it never once occurred to him to go north.

But Smoots Beste never bought a farm with the price of the oxen and the high-bulwarked, teak-built, waterproof-canvas tilted waggon that had cost such a good round sum. There was a big rainfall on the third day. It began with the typical African thunderstorm—deafening, continuous rolls and crashes of heavy cloud-artillery, and lightning that blazed and darted without intermission, and ran zigzagging in a horrible, deadly, playful fashion over the veld, as though looking for dishonest folks to shrivel. One terrible flash struck the wheel-oxen, a thin double tongue of blue flame sped flickering from ridge to ridge of the six gaunt backs ... there was a smell of burning hair—a reek of sulphur. The team lay outstretched dead on the veld, the heavy yoke across their patient necks, the long horns curving, the thin starved bodies already beginning to bloat and swell in the swift decomposition that follows death by the electric fluid.

Smoots Beste crawled under the waggon, and, remembering all he had heard his father spell out from the Dutch Bible about the Judgment Day, and the punishment of sinners in everlasting flame, felt very ill at ease. The storm passed over, and the rain poured all through the night, but dawn brought in a clear blue day; and with it a train of eight transport-waggons, and several wearied, muddy droves of sheep and cattle, the property of the Imperial Government Commissariat Department, Gueldersdorp, being taken from Basutoland East up to Gueldersdorp, under convoy of an escort of B.S.A. Police. To the non-commissioned officer in command Smoots Beste, resigned to the discharge of a trust, handed the letter for the Civil Commissioner.

The sergeant, sitting easily in the saddle, looked at the boldly-written direction on the envelope, and smelt no rats—at least until he coolly opened the supposed letter. The scrawled sheet of paper it contained was a surprise, but he did not let Smoots see that. Then the following brief dialogue took place:

"You were trekking up to Gueldersdorp," he said to the decidedly nervous Smoots, "to fetch down a Deputy Civil Commissioner to deal with the effects of a dead English traveller, at a house kept by the man who wrote this letter—that is, three days' trek over the veld to the southward, and called the Free State Hotel?"

Smoots nodded heavily. The dapper sergeant cocked his felt smasher hat, and turned between pleasantly smiling lips the cigar he was smoking. Then he pointed with his riding-whip, a neatly varnished sjambok, with a smart silver top, to the north-west.

"There lies Gueldersdorp. Rum that when the lightning killed the ox-team you should have been trekking north-east, isn't it?"

Smoots Beste agreed that it was decidedly rum.

The sergeant said, without a change in his agreeable smile:

"All right; you can inspan six of our drove-bullocks, and drive the waggon with us to Gueldersdorp."

"Thank you, Baas!" said Smoots, without enthusiasm.

"If you like to take the risk," added the sergeant, who had not quite finished. He ended with an irrepressible outburst of honest indignation: "Why, you blasted, thieving Dutch scum, do you think I don't know you were stealing that span and waggon?"

And as Smoots, sweating freely, unyoked the dead oxen, he decided in his heavy mind that he would be missing long before the convoy got to Gueldersdorp.

Nine waggons rolled on where only eight had been before. The mounted men hurried on the daubed and wearied droves of Commissariat beasts. Smoots Beste drove the scratch team of bullocks, but his heart was as water within his belly, and there was no resonance in the smack of his whip. When the convoy came to a town, he vanished, and the story thenceforth knows him no more. The discreet sergeant of police did not even notice that he was missing until several days later, when the end of the journey was near at hand. He was a sober, careful man, and a good husband. He shortly afterwards made quite a liberal remittance to his wife, and his troopers pushed Kruger half-sovereigns across most of the bars in Gueldersdorp shortly after the purchase by a Dopper farmer of a teak-built Cape waggon that a particular friend of the sergeant's had got to sell. And they were careful, at first, not to wag loose tongues. But as time went on the story of the English traveller who had brought the body of the woman to the Free State Hotel, so many days' trek to the southwards from Gueldersdorp, trickled from lip to lip. And years later, years too late, it came to the ears of a friend of dead Richard Mildare.

The sergeant maintained silence. He was a careful officer, and a discreet man, and, what is more, religious. In controversial arguments with the godless he would sometimes employ a paraphrase of the story of Smoots Beste to strengthen