They left Capetown on Thursday a week ago, with twelve boxes of specie, each one of which weighed eighty pounds. For six days they lived, ate, and slept on those boxes. Their only holiday was at Naauwpoort, when they paid a high compliment to six A. and S. Highlanders by putting the boxes in their charge and going out to stretch their legs. For hundreds of miles the train ran through desolate karoo in which a band of train robbers would have stood a fair chance of success. At Colesberg the twelve heavy boxes were piled out again on the platform and into the ladies' waiting-room and the weary bankers stretched out on them, for the night. There was to have been a military guard for the gold at Norval's Pont, but somehow the guard did not connect. The bank men found themselves stalled at a broken bridge, with the choice of trusting their bullion to a thin wire rope slung across the broken spans, or putting it on a pont that formed a rope ferry across the river. They chose the pont. The train from Capetown reached Orange River at 2 o'clock on Tuesday afternoon. The train on the north side of the river had to wait until 7 o'clock for the gold. The transfer across the river was the most interesting part of the journey. Messrs. Michell and du Preez deny that their interest had anything of anxiety in it. They trusted the twelve sweating volunteers who wandered wide from the train to the pont with its 960 pounds avoirdupois and 25,000 pounds sterling. Du Preez walked at the head of the volunteers and Michell at the tail. The volunteers seemed to be walking all over the country. So the twelve boxes were finally slammed into the guard's van on the north side of the river, and the bank manager and his teller clambered in on top of them. If there was a military guard on the train they didn't have the comfort of knowing it. They had been told that all the Boers were giving in their arms and that the country through which they rode was thoroughly pacified, but then, as du Preez said, "when you are travelling with twelve boxes of bullion you can't be dead sure of anything." When the train reached Bloemfontein on Wednesday, the boxes were taken at once to the vaults of the National Bank of the Orange Free State, and the two men, wearied by their six days' vigil, went at once to bed, and to sleep. Mr. Michell, who manages the Standard Bank affairs in all parts of South Africa, is only temporarily in Bloemfontein. Mr. D. Savory, formerly of the branch bank at Oudtshoorn, will be manager of the Bloemfontein branch. Mr. A. S. D. Robertson, formerly in the branch bank at Ceres, will be accountant, and Mr. du Preez will be teller. CHAPTER XIII WE LEAVE "THE FRIEND" TO SEE A FIGHT _The Thirteenth Number, produced by Mr. James Barnes of New York._