She had called Boyce a devil and implied a wish that he were dead.  For myself I did not know what to make of him, for reasons which I will state.  I never approved of the engagement.  As a matter of fact, I knew—­and was one of the very few who knew—­of a black mark against him—­the very blackest mark that could be put against a soldier’s name.  It was a puzzling business.  And when I say I knew of the mark, I must be candid and confess that its awful justification lies in the conscience of one man living in the world to-day—­if indeed he be still alive.

Boyce was a great bronzed, bull-necked man, with an overpowering personality.  People called him the very model of a soldier.  He was always admired and feared by his men.  His fierce eye and deep, resonant voice, and a suggestion of hidden strength, even of brutality, commanded implicit obedience.  But both glance and voice would soften caressingly and his manner convey a charm which made him popular with men—­brother officers and private soldiers alike —­and with women.  With regard to the latter—­to put things crudely —­they saw in him the essential, elemental male.  Of that I am convinced.  It was the open secret of his many successes.  And he had a buoyant, boyish, disarming, chivalrous way with him.  If he desired a woman’s lips he would always begin by kissing the hem of her skirt.

Had I not known what I did, I, an easy-going sort of Christian temperamentally inclined to see the best in my fellow-creatures, and, as I boastingly said a little while ago, a trained judge of men, should doubtless have fallen, like most other people, under the spell of his fascination.  But whenever I met him, I used to look at him and say to myself:  “What’s at the back of you anyway?  What about that business at Vilboek’s Farm?”

Now this is what I knew—­with the reservation I have made above—­ and to this day he is not aware of my knowledge.

It was towards the end of the Boer War.  Boyce had come out rather late; for which, of course, he was not responsible.  A soldier has to go when he is told.  After a period of humdrum service he was sent off with a section of mounted infantry to round up a certain farm-house suspected of harbouring Boer combatants.  The excursion was a mere matter of routine—­of humdrum commonplace.  As usual it was made at night, but this was a night of full dazzling moon.  The farm lay in a hollow of the veldt, first seen from the crest of a kopje.  There it lay below, ramshackle and desolate, a rough wall around; flanked by outbuildings—­barn and cowsheds.  The section rode down.  The stoep led to a shuttered front.  There was no sign of life.  The moonlight blazed full on it.  They dismounted, tethered their horses behind the wall, and entered the yard.  The place was deserted, derelict—­not even a cat.

Suddenly a shot rang out from somewhere in the main building, and the Sergeant, the next man to Boyce, fell dead, shot through the brain.  The men looked at Boyce for command and saw a hulking idiot paralysed by fear.