Captain Leo Frazer, age thirty and an Englishman, had a trick of
looking Fate between the eyes with those black-fringed blue eyes of
his, of accepting its gifts with gratitude, its occasional knocks
with cheery optimism. At Rugby he had ultimately been captain of the
school; at Oxford he had been of equal prowess in rowing and
football. Since taking his degree, he had been a successful doctor
in the intervals of time allowed him by his membership in one of the
crack regiments at home. He had never seriously contemplated the
possibility of active service; but Colenso had been too strong a
pull upon him. Leaving some scores of sorrowing patients to bemoan
him as already dead, he had promptly shipped for Cape Town. The year
of grace nineteen hundred had found him on the scene at most of its
exciting events. Where Fate refused to take him, he asserted his
strong hand and took Fate, until that weary lady was forced to go
hopping about the map of South Africa with the agility of a sand
flea.
In battle, Frazer was always in the thickest spatter of bullets,
where he bowed himself to the inevitable and lay prone, though with
his face turned to one side to give free passage to the chaff which
carried his comrades through so many grim hours. In the presence of
danger, his humor never failed him. In those sorrowful hours which
followed the cessation of firing, no man was in greater demand than
he. Many a brave fellow had died with his hand shut fast over
Frazer's long, slim fingers; many a man's first, awful moments in
hospital had been soothed by the touch of those same firm, slim
hands. And in the singsongs around the camp fire, or at the mess
table, Frazer's voice was always heard, no matter how great the
tumult of a moment before.
Like many another of his countrymen, Captain Frazer had learned
lessons since he had left the ship at Cape Town, just a year before.
He had come out from England, trained to the inflexibly formal
tactics of the British army. Again and again he had seen those
tactics proved of no avail in the face of an invisible enemy and an
almost inexpugnable country. He had learned the nerve-racking
tension of being exposed to a storm of bullets that came apparently
from nowhere to cut down the British lines as the hail cuts down the
standing grain; he had learned the shock of seeing the level veldt,
over which he was marching, burst into a line of fire at his very
feet from a spot where it seemed that scarce a dozen men could lie
in hiding, to say nothing of a dozen scores. He had learned that,
under such fire, a man's first duty was to drop flat on his face, to
push up a tiny breastwork of earth and to fire from behind that
slender shelter. England could not afford to send her sons over seas
for the sake of having them slaughtered by needless obedience to the
laws of martial good form. Fighting a nation of hunters, they too
must adopt the methods of the hunt. And, most of all, Captain Frazer
had learned the imperative need of mounted riflemen. Two months
before, while lying up at Durban until his wrist had healed from a
Mauser bullet, he had come into close contact with the Marquis of
Tullibardine. As a result of that contact, January had found Captain
Frazer in Cape Town, ready to take command of the newly enlisted
Scottish Horse.
Now, as he looked over his force at Piquetberg Road, he was
congratulating himself that his men were fit for service, very fit.
Frazer knew something of men. Experience had assured him that these
men were worth training and his months of service under the great
Field Marshal had taught him that an officer could be a man among
his men, yet lose not one jot of his dignity. Accordingly, Frazer
set himself to the task in band. By the time he had been at
Piquetberg Road for two days, he knew the name and face of every man
in his squadron. A week later he could tell to a nicety which of his
men were engaged to girls at home, which of them had heard of one
Rudyard Kipling, and which of them could be counted upon in an
emergency. The two latter counts Weldon filled absolutely. In regard
to the first, Frazer permitted himself a moment of acute uneasiness.
It had been in a spirit of unmitigated joy that Frazer had met Ethel
Dent in Cape Town, on the morning of New Year's day. In London he
had known the girl just well enough to admire her intensely, not
well enough, however, to have found out that she had any permanent
connection with South Africa. His joy had lasted until the hour of
his calling upon her, three days later; then it had received a
sudden check. Ethel had been as cordial as ever; nevertheless, her
talk had been full of the young Canadian whom he had met in the
drive. Frazer was intensely human. After a year of separation he
would have preferred to bound the talk by the experiences of their
two selves.
As a natural consequence, he had developed a strong prejudice
against Weldon; but Weldon, all unconsciously, had done much to
remove that prejudice. Not every man could manage a crazy, bucking
broncho in any such fashion as that; fewer still could come out of
the scrimmage, unhurt, to bow to a young woman with a cordiality
quite untinged with boyish bravado. That day at Maitland, Frazer had
registered his mental approval of the long-legged, lean Canadian
with his keen gray eyes and his wrists of bronze. He had registered
a second note of approval, that first night at Piquetberg Road, when
Weldon, with no unnecessary words, had contrived to impress upon the
mind of his captain that he was to be included in the guard to cross
the river. Totally obedient and respectful, Weldon nevertheless had
given the impression of a man who intended to win his own way.
Moreover, the direction of that way appeared to be straight towards
the front.
Meanwhile, peacefully unconscious of this diagnosis, Weldon was
sitting on the river bank, prosaically occupied in scooping out the
remaining taste left in an almost-empty jam tin. Beside him, Carew
was similarly occupied. Two more jam tins were between them and,
exactly opposite the pair of jam tins, there squatted a burly
Kaffir, young, alert and crowned with a thatch of hair which by
rights should have sprouted from the back of a sable pig. His mouth
was slightly open, and now and then his tongue licked out, like the
tongue of an eager dog. Aside from his hair, his costume consisted
of one black sock worn in lieu of muffler and a worn pair of khaki
trousers.
Behind him, the river caught the sunset light and turned it to a
sheet of flowing copper; beyond stretched the open country in long,
waving lines that ended in the deep yellow band of the afterglow.
Above them, the sky was blue; but it dropped from the blue zenith to
the yellow horizon through every imaginable shade of emerald and
topaz until all other shades lost themselves in one vivid blaze of
burnt orange. It had been a day of intense heat. Already, however,
the falling twilight and the inevitable eastward shift of the wind
had brought the first hint of the evening chill.
Weldon shrugged his shoulders.
"Hurry up, Carew," he adjured his companion. "I am for leaving our
feast and hieing us back to the sanctuary."
"Right, oh!" Carew raised his jam tin and took careful aim at a rock
in mid stream.
Instantly the Kaffir hitched forward.
"Mine?" he demanded.
Carew stayed his arm.
"What for?"
"Eat. Um good."
"Nothing in there but atmosphere, sonny. You can get that out of any
box. Suppose I can hit that little black point, Weldon?"
"Not if I know it," Weldon said coolly, as he tossed his own tin to
the boy and, seizing that of Carew, threw it after its mate. "Let
the little coon have his lick, Carew. It's not pretty to watch him
go at it, tongue first; but we can't all be Chesterfields. What is
your name, sonny?"
The boy paused with suspended tongue, while he rolled the great
whites of his eyes up at the questioner. Then, the whites still
turned upon Weldon, he took one more hasty lick.
"Kruger Roberts," he said then, detaching himself for an instant
from his treasure. "Oh, I infer you like to sit on fences?" Weldon
said interrogatively.
"Ya, Boss."
"Which side do you intend to come down?"
"Me no come down," the boy answered nonchalantly, more from inherent
indifference than from any comprehension of Weldon's allegory.
"All right. Stop where you are. Meanwhile, I think I should call you
Jamboree."
"Ya, Boss." The face vanished from sight behind the tilted tin. Then
it reappeared, and a huge finger pointed to the remaining tins.
"Mine, too?"
But already the boy was forgotten. Weldon was following hard on the
heels of the sentry who had dashed through the gate in the
churchyard wall.
Four o'clock the next morning, that darkest hour which, by its very
darkness, heralds the coming dawn, found C. Squadron moving out from
the gray-walled churchyard, their faces set towards the eastern
mountains. All night long they had stood under arms, ready for the
attack which might be at hand. By dawn, they were well on their way
towards the laager, fifteen miles distant, whence had come the
scouting hand of Boers who, for two days past, had made leisurely
efforts to pick off their scattered sentinels. At the head of the
little troop rode Frazer. Behind him and as close to his heels as
military law allowed, came Weldon, mounted on the same little black
horse which had so often carried him to the hunt at home. Horse and
rider both sniffed the chilly dawn with eager anticipation. Each
knew that something was in store for them; each contrived to impress
upon the other his determination to make a record, whatever
happened. For one short minute, Weldon let his strong hand rest on
the satiny neck. He could feel the answering pressure of the muscles
beneath the shining skin. That was enough. He and The Nig were in
perfect understanding, one with another.
"Weldon?"
He spurred forward to the Captain's side and saluted.
"In the flurry, last night, I forgot to tell you that Miss Dent
comes to Piquetberg Road, to-day. She is to visit a cousin, Miss
Mellen; and she wished me to tell you that she hoped you could find
time to call upon her."
The Captain spoke low, his eyes, after the first moment, steadily
fixed upon the line of hills before them. Weldon answered in the
same low tone.
"You have heard from Miss Dent?"
"Yes. A note came, last night. She is to be here for a month, while
her uncle is in England on a business trip. Mr. Mellen is the mayor.
You probably know the house."
"I can easily find it. Please tell Miss Dent I shall be sure to call
as--"
A blinding flash ran along the line of hills close in the foreground
where, an instant before, had been only empty ground. There was a
sharp crackle, a strident hum and then the muffled plop of bullets
burying themselves in the earth six hundred feet in the rear. The
Nig grew taut in every muscle; then she edged slowly towards the
huge khaki-colored horse that bore the Captain, and, for an instant,
the two muzzles touched.
"Too long a range, man. Try it again," Frazer observed coolly, as
his glance swept the empty landscape, then, turning, swept the faces
of his men.
That last sight was to his liking. He nodded to himself and
straightened in his saddle, while the orders dropped from his lips,
swift, clean-cut and brooking no question nor delay. Ten men went
galloping off far to the southward, to vanish among the foothills
and reappear on the pass behind the enemy, while a dozen Boers,
springing up from the bowels of the earth, followed hard on their
heels. Ten more took the horses and fell back out of range of the
firing; and the remainder of the squadron stayed in their places and
helped to play out the game.
It was all quite simple, all a matter of course. Instead of the fuss
and fume and chaos of fighting, it had worked itself out like a
problem in mathematics, and Weldon, as he lay on the ground with his
Lee-Enfield cuddled into the curve of his shoulder, felt himself
reducing it to a pair of simultaneous equations: if X Britons equal
Y Boers on the firing line, and Y Britons draw off the fire of W
Boers, then how many Britons--But there came a second flash and a
second spatter, nearer, this time; and he lost his mathematics in a
sudden rush of bad temper which made him long to fly at the
invisible foe and beat him about the head with his clubbed rifle. It
was no especial satisfaction for a man in his position to climb up
on his elbow and help to discharge a volley at an empty landscape.
The war pictures he had been prone to study in his boyhood had been
full of twisty-necked prancing horses and bright-coated swaggering
men, all on their feet, and very hot and earnest. Here the picture
was made up of a row of brown-clothed forms lying flat on their
stomachs and, far before them, a single flat-topped hill and a few
heaps of scattered black rocks. And this was modern war.
There came a third blaze, a third hum of Mauser bullets. Then he
heard a swift intake of the breath, followed by Carew's voice, the
drawling, languid voice which Weldon had learned to associate with
moments of deep excitement.
"Say, Weldon, some beggar has hit me in the shoulder!"
Then of a sudden Weldon realized that at last he knew what it meant
to be under fire.