“Ye-es,” said the Captain, a shade bitterly, as he wiped the sweat from a sun-skinned nose. “You want me to come back and report all clear. If anything happens it will be my fault. If they get away it will be my fault for disregarding the signal. I love officers who suggest and advise, and want to make their reputations in twenty minutes.”

“’Don’t see much ’ere, sir,” said the sergeant, scanning the bare cup of the hollow where a dust-devil danced alone.

“No? We’ll go on.”

“If we get among these steep ’ills we lose touch of the ’elio.”

“Very likely. Trot.”

The rounded mounds grew to spiked kopjes, heart-breaking to climb under a hot sun at four thousand feet above sea level. This is where the scouts found their spurs peculiarly useful.

Jan van Staden had thoughtfully allowed the invading force a front of two rifle-shots or four thousand yards, and they kept a 52thousand yards within his estimate. Ten men strung over two miles feel that they have explored all the round earth.

52

They saw stony slopes combing over in scrub, narrow valleys clothed with stone, low ridges of splintered stone, and tufts of brittle-stemmed bush. An irritating wind, split up by many rocky barriers, cuffed them over the ears and slapped them in the face at every turn. They came upon an abandoned camp fire, a little fresh horse-dung, and an empty ammunition-box splintered up for fire-wood, an old boot, and a stale bandage.

A few hundred yards farther along the road a battered Mauser had been thrown into a bush. The glimmer of its barrel drew the scouts from the hillside, and here the road after passing between two flat-topped kopjes entered a valley nearly half a mile wide, rose slightly, and over the nek of a ridge gave clear view across the windy plain northward.

“They’re on the dead run, for sure,” said a trooper. “Here’s their fire and their litter and their guns, and that’s where they’re bolting to.” He pointed over the ridge to the bellying dust cloud a mile long. 53A vulture high overhead flickered down, steadied herself, and hung motionless.

53

“See!” said Jan van Staden from the rocks above the road, to his waiting commando. “It turns like a well-oiled wheel. They look where they need not look, but here, where they should look on 

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