time he listened intently for possible sounds from the
distance where his friends might be encamped, and might fire off their
guns at seeing his light; or he listened yet more intently for sounds
nearer at hand: but all was still, except for the occasional cracking
of the wood in his own fire, and the slight whistle of the breeze as it
crept past the stones on the kopje. He doubled up his great hat and put
it in the pocket of his overcoat, and put on a little two-pointed cap
his mother had made for him, which fitted so close that only one lock
of white hair hung out over his forehead. He turned up the collar of his
coat to shield his neck and ears, and threw it open in front that the
blaze of the fire might warm him. He had known many nights colder than
this when he had sat around the camp fire with his comrades, talking of
the niggers they had shot or the kraals they had destroyed, or grumbling
over their rations; but tonight the chill seemed to creep into his very
bones.

The darkness of the night above him, and the silence of the veld about
him, oppressed him. At times he even wished he might hear the cry of a
jackal or of some larger beast of prey in the distance; and he wished
that the wind would blow a little louder, instead of making that little
wheezing sound as it passed the corners of the stones. He looked down
at his gun, which lay cocked ready on the ground at his right side;
and from time to time he raised his hand automatically and fingered the
cartridges in his belt. Then he stretched out his small wiry hands to
the fire and warmed them. It was only half past ten, and it seemed to
him he had been sitting here ten hours at the least.

After a while he threw two more large logs on the fire, and took the
flask out of his pocket. He examined it carefully by the firelight to
see how much it held: then he took a small draught, and examined it
again to see how much it had fallen; and put it back in his breast
pocket.

Then Trooper Peter Halket fell to thinking.

It was not often that he thought. On patrol and sitting round camp fires
with the other men about him there was no time for it; and Peter Halket
had never been given to much thinking. He had been a careless boy at the
village school; and though, when he left, his mother paid the village
apothecary to read learned books with him at night on history and
science, he had not retained much of them. As a rule he lived in the
world immediately about him, an