'We'd better begin at once. God, I wonder what's happened to
old Solly Maritz, with his bottle face? Yon was a fine battle at the
drift when I was sitting up to my neck in the Orange praying that
Brits' lads would take my head for a stone.'

Peter was as thorough a mountebank, when he got started, as
Blenkiron himself. All the way back to Lisbon he yarned about
Maritz and his adventures in German South West till I half believed
they were true. He made a very good story of our doings, and by
his constant harping on it I pretty soon got it into my memory.
That was always Peter's way. He said if you were going to play a
part, you must think yourself into it, convince yourself that you
were it, till you really were it and didn't act but behaved naturally.
The two men who had started that morning from the hotel door
had been bogus enough, but the two men that returned were
genuine desperadoes itching to get a shot at England.

We spent the evening piling up evidence in our favour. Some
kind of republic had been started in Portugal, and ordinarily the
cafes would have been full of politicians, but the war had quieted
all these local squabbles, and the talk was of nothing but what was
doing in France and Russia. The place we went to was a big, well-
lighted show on a main street, and there were a lot of sharp-eyed
fellows wandering about that I guessed were spies and police agents.
I knew that Britain was the one country that doesn't bother about
this kind of game, and that it would be safe enough to let ourselves go.

I talked Portuguese fairly well, and Peter spoke it like a Lourenco
Marques bar-keeper, with a lot of Shangaan words to fill up. He
started on curacao, which I reckoned was a new drink to him, and