“Five minutes later, a large, strong-looking Boer came out, towel round his neck, suspenders hanging over his hips. He called for his friend and, receiving no answer, strolled down to the river to see if he’d gone for a swim. He sank to his knees, rinsed his face and looked again. ‘Piet! Where’ve you gone? Where’s the coffee?’ or some such. We’ll never know. They were his last words. A naked man rose up from the reeds inches away in the river, grabbed him by his dangling suspenders, whipped them round his throat and pulled tight. When he’d finished gargling, his body joined the first, bobbing downstream with the strong current. Private Sexton doing his duty.

“At the same moment, Ratty and the Fox were under the tree securing the horses, making sure no one attempted to get away. I’d positioned Corporal Jessup fifty yards distant on a round-topped knoll with a rifle and a good view of both approaches to the cabin and orders to shoot dead on sight anyone who wasn’t one of us.”

“The third man?”

“I had no idea whether he was still in the cabin. My first thought was that the horse belonged to a messenger out from beleaguered Kimberley. A section of the Kimberley Light Horse had been caught up in the siege and were still quartered in the town. It wasn’t a watertight situation. Troopers did occasionally get through with news and orders to get a move on. Ravings from Rhodes. As head of De Beers, he had a business to run. His gold mines and his diamond mines were inoperable when they were being fired at by the cannon the Boers had hauled up on the railroad. Long Tom! It had a range of four miles and had brought the city to a standstill.”

“He had a point!” Redfyre said. “Wasn’t that what the war was mostly about? Owning, controlling and making money out of the richest mineral finds since the gold rush? That’s why you’d been shipped over there. To tell a race of Dutch farmers they did not have the rights or the expertise to operate the mines. That they should just get on peaceably with their farming and cattle raising and leave the engineering and mineral exploitation to those with the knowledge and resources to do it—the Uitlanders. The foreigners. The British, the Americans, the Canadians . . . but above all, Cecil Rhodes.”