By no other possible means could the Gordian knot be cut, and both Bessie and her old uncle be saved.

If he were dead he could not marry Bessie, and if he died with the warrant unsigned their uncle could not be executed.

That was the terrible answer to her riddle.
Yet it was most just that he should die, for had he not murdered and attempted murder?
Surely if ever a man deserved a swift and awful doom that man was Frank Muller.
And so this forsaken, helpless girl, crouching upon the ground a torn and bespattered fugitive in the miserable hiding-hole of a Hottentot, arraigned the powerful leader of men before the tribunal of her conscience, and without pity, if without wrath, passed upon him a sentence of extinction.
But who was to be the executioner?
A dreadful thought flashed into her mind and made her heart stand still, but she dismissed it.

No, she had not come to that! Her eyes wandering round the kennel lit upon Jantje's assegais and sticks in the corner, and these gave her another inspiration.

Jantje should do the deed.
John had told her one day when they were sitting together in "The Palatial" at Pretoria the whole of Jantje's awful story about the massacre of his relatives by Frank Muller twenty years before, of which, indeed, she already knew something.