in darkness over rough ground-tripping men with rifles in their hands make what appears to be a fearful clatter. By hypothesis it would seem impossible to surprise even a sleeping picket. But you have only to be on picket duty once to realise how full the night is of deceptive noises. In reality the advance was made with praiseworthy silence. Just as the top was reached, the Kaffir plucked Harvey's arm. His veldtbred eyes could see that which was still obscured from the white man. "Near, near!" he whispered in the captain's ear. Harvey raised both his hands above his head. Silently, but with the agility of cats, the four lean Colonials followed him. Six paces on, and under the shelter of a rock appear

the forms of two men, asleep, and rolled in their blankets. It is not necessary to describe what followed. A leap forward by four lithe figures with shortened arms, a sinuous flash of steel, a sickening thud and gurgle, one choking wail, and all was over, and two farmer-soldiers had paid the extreme penalty for the betrayal of the trust their comrades had placed in them!

Five minutes for breathing-space.

Then

the little line was reformed diagonally along the table-top of the ridge. Half the game had been won. It now remained to complete the coup. If the unexpected did not happen, there was no reason why the farmhouse should not be surrounded by daybreak. But in war it is the unexpected which does happen. Slowly the thirty men worked along the plateau towards the point of the ridge. Two-thirds had been traversed, when suddenly two figures appeared against the eastern sky.

"Reliefs for the picket,-d

n!" muttered

the Rimington captain, and as the truth flashed upon him him came the challenge in

Dutch

"Wie dar?"

"Follow me, Rimington's!" and the nearest men joined their captain in a dash to reach the men. But it was too late. Up came the Mausers. Two wild shots, and the relief had turned and was rushing down the hill towards the farm. If it had been day, all might have yet been saved by pace. But in night operations you cannot take these

risks, especially when only one man in the force knows the exact position of the objective. Harvey rallied his men on the ridge, and even before he could place them in position, Mausers were popping from below, disclosing the kraals and outhouses of the farm.

"We must stop up here till daybreak. They will be gone before that. Well, there will be no surprise of Hertzog at Houwater to-day, all through a turn of rank bad luck!" and the Rimington captain commenced to fill his pipe, for his long abstinence from tobacco-smoke by reason of the night-march had been his particular grievance since the column had left Britstown.

133

VI.

A POOR SCENT.

"THERE will be no surprise of Hertzog at Houwater to-day."

The Rimington captain had summed up the results consequent upon the night-attack with considerable accuracy, and as his party, in obedience to orders, worked down the banks of the Ongers River covering the right of the combined advance upon Houwater, there was abundance of evidence to show that Hertzog and Company had little intention of becoming enmeshed by the ponderous strategy set in motion against them. Nor was the weather favourable. The storm which had preceded the night-attack was one of those lowly pitched thunder-clouds which, caught in a craterlike valley enclosed by kopjes, revolved in a circle until it had spent itself. It took some hours

But

of morning sun before it was finally dissolved. Consequently when the advance-guard of the force which was formed by the New Cavalry Brigade topped the great sloping glacis, inclining for all the world like an under-feature of the Sussex Downs, into the stagnant morass which is Houwater's most prominent feature, the last Boers were disappearing into the labyrinth of Minie Kloof beyond. there was just sufficient excitement to take the cold and stiffness, bred of a miserable march, out of the bones of the men. The pom-pom unlimbered above the drift, and spent, at an impossible range, a belt of its tiny bombs. A spare dozen of Rimingtons, who had pushed farther forward than the rest, lightened their bandoliers by a few cartridges, and then, unmolested, the miniature British army marched into possession of its point d'appui.

You who have only seen the British soldier at his worst, that is, when he is buttoned into a tunic little removed in design from a straitwaistcoat, or when the freedom of the man has been subordinated to the lick-and-spittle polish of the dummy,-you who glory in tin