have liked to lie down; but he dared not, for fear
he should drop asleep. He leaned forward with his hands between his
crossed knees, and watched the blaze he had made.

Then, after a while, Peter Halket's thoughts became less clear: they
became at last, rather, a chain of disconnected pictures, painting
themselves in irrelevant order on his brain, than a line of connected
ideas. Now, as he looked into the crackling blaze, it seemed to be one
of the fires they had make to burn the natives' grain by, and they were
throwing in all they could not carry away: then, he seemed to see his
mother's fat ducks waddling down the little path with the green grass
on each side. Then, he seemed to see his huts where he lived with the
prospectors, and the native women who used to live with him; and he
wondered where the women were. Then--he saw the skull of an old Mashona
blown off at the top, the hands still moving. He heard the loud cry of
the native women and children as they turned the maxims on to the kraal;
and then he heard the dynamite explode that blew up a cave. Then again
he was working a maxim gun, but it seemed to him it was more like the
reaping machine he used to work in England, and that what was going down
before it was not yellow corn, but black men's heads; and he thought
when he looked back they lay behind him in rows, like the corn in
sheaves.

The logs sent up a flame clear and high, and, where they split, showed
a burning core inside: the cracking and spluttering sounded in his brain
like the discharge of a battery of artillery. Then he thought suddenly
of a black woman he and another man caught alone in the bush, her baby
on her back, but young and pretty. Well, they didn't shoot her!--and a
black woman wasn't white! His mother didn't understand these things;
it was all so different in England from South Africa. You couldn't
be expected to do the same sort of things here as there. He had an
unpleasant feeling that he was justifying himself to his mother, and
that he didn't know how to.

He leaned further and further forward: so far at last, that the little
white lock of his hair which hung out under his cap was almost singed by
the fire. His eyes were still open, but the lids drooped over them, and
his hands hung lower and lower between his knees. There was no picture
left on his brain now, but simply an impress of the blazing logs before
him.

Then, Trooper Peter Halket started. He sat up and listened. The