So he spent the night between two British soldiers, and with the first approach of dawn he cautiously and stealthily extricated himself from his perilous position and made his way to town.
Three or four days after the perfidious betrayal of the Secret Service men the Committee was staggered with the tidings of the execution of their comrades, Krause and Venter, in the prison-yard of the old Pretoria jail.
The third, the nameless one, had, it was said, saved himself by turning King's evidence.
Of their last days on earth nothing will ever be known, but those of us blessed or cursed with the divine and cruel gift of imagination see in our mind's eye two men in prison-cells in solitary confinement, one a broken-hearted husband, the other the beloved son of a widowed mother.
Wounded and suffering they lie on their last bed of pain. Friendless and alone they await the untimely end of their brief but glorious career. Longing, with all the weakness of the human heart, for one last look of love, one reassuring clasp from a tender woman's hand, they prepare themselves to meet the death they have faced so often and so manfully in their heroic struggle for liberty and independence.
Could there have been fear or despair in the hearts of those two men, with the knowledge beating in their brains that they held their lives in their own hands, that one word from them of information against their fellow-workers could avert their doom, and that they, and they alone, could save themselves at the sacrifice of honour and fidelity?
How in the end they met their fate we do not know--we can but dimly guess.
The painful task of acquainting Mrs. Krause with the fate of her husband fell to the lot of Mr. Botha and Mr. Hocke.
As she would probably be destitute, the two men decided to collect a sum of money before approaching her with their evil tidings, and this they had to do by stealth, in order not to bring suspicion on themselves.
They were successful in obtaining over £34 for the bereaved wife in a very short time, from friends and sympathisers as poor as they themselves, and later, from the same source, in the same unostentatious way, a far larger amount was collected in order to send the widow to her relatives in Germany.