“Well, me and Adrian and a crowd of dam Dutchmen was sent down the road to Cape Town in first-class carriages under escort. (What did I think of your enlisted men? They are largely different from ours, Sir: very largely.) As I was saying, we slid down south, with Adrian looking out of the car-window and crying. Dutchmen cry mighty easy for a breed that fights as they do; but I never understood how a Dutchman could curse till we crossed into the Orange Free State Colony, and he lifted up his hand and cursed Steyn for a solid ten minutes. Then we got into the Colony, and the rebs—ministers mostly and schoolmasters—came round the cars with fruit and sympathy and texts. Van Zyl talked to ’em in Dutch, and one man, a big red-bearded minister, at Beaufort West, I remember, he jest wilted on the platform. “‘Keep your prayers for yourself,’ says Van Zyl, throwing back a bunch of grapes. ‘You’ll need ’em, and you’ll need the fruit too, when the war comes down here. _You_ done it,’ he says. ‘You and your picayune Church that’s deader than Cronje’s dead horses! What sort of a God have you been unloading on us, you black _aas vogels_? The British came, and we beat ’em,’ he says, ‘and you sat still and prayed. The British beat us, and you sat still,’ he says. ‘You told us to hang on, and we hung on, and our farms was burned, and you sat still—you and your God. See here,’ he says, ‘I shot my Bible full of bullets after Bloemfontein went, and you and God didn’t say anything. Take it and pray over it before we Federals help the British to knock hell out of you rebels.’ “Then I hauled him back into the car. I judged he’d had a fit. But life’s curious—and sudden—and mixed. I hadn’t any more use for a reb than Van Zyl, and I knew something of the lies they’d fed us up with from the Colony for a year and more. I told the minister to pull his freight out of that, and went on with my lunch, when another man come along and shook hands with Van Zyl. He’d known him at close range in the Kimberley seige and before. Van Zyl was well seen by his neighbours, I judge. As soon as this other man opened his mouth I said, ‘You’re Kentucky, ain’t you?’ ‘I am,’ he says; ‘and what may you be?’ I told him right off, for I was pleased to hear good United States in any man’s mouth; but he whipped his hands behind him and said, ‘I’m not knowing any man that fights for a Tammany Dutchman. But I presoom you’ve been well paid, you dam gun-runnin’ Yank.’ “Well, Sir, I wasn’t looking for that, and it near knocked me over, while old man Van Zyl started in to explain.