Chapter XVIII A Skirmish by the Way
At earliest dawn Mortimer was up and away again.
Linda had risen up and prepared breakfast for him; quiet, capable, busied with frying-pan, fire, the setting of a place at table; he looked at her as she moved about the kitchen, and wondered had not the sight of her face of agony last night been a dream? She even rallied him a little.
‘You must eat well,’ she said, as she put fried eggs and bacon before him—the pleasantest meal he had eaten since he had left Sydney; ‘you don’t want to be out another night with those despatches of yours loose.’
‘I want shooting,’ he said, his forehead burning.
‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘you are young yet to it all; you will have plenty of time to learn carefulness before the war is over.’
‘I hope so,’ he said.
‘I am afraid so,’ she assented.
Something struck him. That soldier-farmer in the quiet front room—who was to bury him? who dig his grave?
‘If I had thought,’ he said, ‘I would have done it myself the—the grave, you know—instead of having breakfast. You girls cannot do it. Is the old man strong enough? I would do it now, but my time is not my own.’ He looked at his watch.
‘I have sent the three little boys to Du Toit’s farm,’ she said, ‘five miles away, to ask them to send two of their Kaffir boys down. All of ours have gone off.’
He shook hands with her when he was going, thanked her for all she had done.
‘It is nothing,’ she said; ‘we have to thank you, yet we don’t, you notice. It is war-time. Good-bye.’
The grey air freshened as the sun climbed foot by foot up over the great kop to the east. The night’s storm had left the veldt fragrant as our own bush after rain. The deserted farms looked at him, a mist of sleep and forgetfulness in their eyes. Those every-day fences, those gates made for farmers to pass through, farmers’ daughters to lean on watching for their lovers, farmers’ children to swing on—was it possible half a dozen regiments had gone crashing through and over them, hastening to headquarters only a week before?
Mortimer looked at the healthy land with a bushman’s appreciative eyes. He wondered now many sheep the farms held. A Boer prisoner at the camp had told him the country carried a sheep to six acres, an ostrich to twelve, and a horse to twenty. He speculated loosely on the chances there would be for an army of drought-ruined Australian settlers to come here after the war with modern implements and knowledge, and astonish these pastoralists, who were a century at least behind Europe in the way of agriculture.
‘Even Cameron’s ahead of them,’ Mortimer thought, his mind reverting sadly to the poor little selection at Wilgandra that bounded Hermie’s life.
A heavy waggon went past drawn by a span of mules, and driven by a Kaffir, who cracked a whip of such length that the ordinary stockwhip was nowhere beside it.
A bent old man, with a cart of vegetables and a horse too decrepit for the war, crept by. Smoke in a place or two went up from the chimneys of the scattered farmhouses. The continent was awake.
Riding yesterday, Mortimer had never known when he might run into a Boer picket, but the farther he went now the danger lessened—in another dozen miles he ought to be somewhere about the beginning of the line the British had made to defend a railway. And after that his ride would lie through country dotted over by the British army.
He pushed on; his horse was fresh and ready again after the night’s rest and a couple of good feeds; his own spirits, chiefly owing to his excellent breakfast, began to rise again and push his carelessness from the chief place in his mind; he grew aflame for a chance to prove his courage, and respect himself once more. Before he left the camp it had been held that a big engagement was certain in a very few days; his mind leapt forward to it now with a keenly sharpened appetite, and he beheld himself making famous his country’s name by impossible feats of strength.
Crack! To the left of him a firearm went off; the bullet passed clear over his head, and rattled on some loose stones as it fell.
He glanced round less in fear than astonishment. At the spot the veldt was singularly clear, and the nearest kopje was far beyond rifle-range. Whir! A second shot struck his helmet, a third grazed his shoulder! His horse plunged and reared; he spun it round and faced a clump of karoo bushes twenty yards to his left, the only place from which the shots could have come, and even these seemed absurd, for no shrub was more than two or three feet high. He raised his revolver; his finger was at the trigger. Then he saw three small faces over the edge of one of the bushes—three that he knew; they were the stolid, secret-looking little boys who had lighted him to the stable last night.
‘The little sweeps!’ he muttered, but moved his finger from the trigger, even though he kept the revolver cocked at them.
‘Do you want me to blow the brains of all three of you out?’ he called. ‘Lay down those guns this minute, or I will.’ He was close up to them, and a sharp glance among the sparse bushes showed him that beyond these small youths he had no other attackers. At the sight of British might in the concrete form of a mounted soldier standing right over them, two of the lads instantly laid down their ponderous old style weapons. The third essayed another shot, but his rifle kicked and the bullet went wild.
‘You young beggar!’ said Stevenson; ‘put it down this instant.’
The lad obeyed sullenly; he was the eldest of the three, and yet not more than twelve; a thickset boy with a heavy, brooding face and fine eyes.
‘And what’s the meaning of this little performance?’ said Mortimer.
Two of the boys had very little knowledge of English, but the eldest had been quick to pick it up from his grandmother and Linda, who had just become his aunt.
‘You killed our fathers,’ he said doggedly. ‘They’ve taken all the good guns with them, or we wouldn’t have missed like this.’
Mortimer had no doubt of it; as it was, the shots had landed so near to the mark that it was plain what was the Boer boys’ pastime at present. There was something about the three small lads that reminded Mortimer irresistibly of Roly—Roly, hung all over with the kitchen cutlery, or prowling about the bush with a broken-barrelled gun, Roly lying face downward behind a great ant-bed and picking off his foes at a lightning rate. He found it hard not to smile.
‘Hand me up those guns,’ he said to the eldest boy.
The boy gave him a stubborn glance, and it needed the discharge of a cartridge over his head to bring him to obedience. Then he handed the poor old musket up sullenly to the conqueror.
‘See here,’ Mortimer said, ‘you’ll make fine soldiers by-and-by. Don’t go and get yourselves into trouble while you’re young, and so ruin your chances. If it had happened to be some one less in a hurry than I am, he’d have marched you over and seen you among the prisoners, just to keep you out of mischief.’
‘He’d have to catch us first,’ said the boy, with a defiant smile.
‘There is such a thing as putting a bullet into the legs,’ said Mortimer gravely. ‘But now cut along and fetch those Kaffirs for your aunt.’
The boys turned round and struck off dejectedly in a new direction; they had come three miles off the road their aunt had sent them by to execute this plot, secretly formed by the eldest boy, for killing off one at least of the enemy.
When Mortimer looked round again, they were mere specks on the veldt.
‘Poor little beggars!’ he said, smiling as he thought over the adventure again. He flung two of the rifles into the river; the third he carried with him as far as the British camp, and gave it to some one of the ambulance there, promising a five-pound note if it were kept safely till the end of the war.
‘Roly’ll go off his head at such a trophy,’ he thought.
He handed in his despatches not many hours later, with no further adventures.