me--unless the
Boers were still on Bulwana. We had shaken off the army, and we were two
miles in front of it, when six men came galloping toward us in an
unfamiliar uniform. They passed us far to the right, regardless of the
trail, and galloping through the high grass. We pulled up when we saw
them, for they had green facings to their gray uniforms, and no one with
Buller's column wore green facings.

We gave a yell in chorus. "Are you from Ladysmith?" we shouted. The
men, before they answered, wheeled and cheered, and came toward us
laughing jubilant. "We're the first men out," cried the officer and we
rode in among them, shaking hands and offering our good wishes. "We're
glad to see you," we said. "We're glad to see _you_," they said. It was
not an original greeting, but it seemed sufficient to all of us. "Are
the Boers on Bulwana?" we asked. "No, they've trekked up Dundee way.
You can go right in."

We parted at the word and started to go right in. We found the culverts
along the railroad cut away and the bridges down, and that galloping
ponies over the roadbed of a railroad is a difficult feat at the best,
even when the road is in working order.

Some men, cleanly dressed and rather pale-looking, met us and said:
"Good-morning." "Are you from Ladysmith?" we called. "No, we're from
the neutral camp," they answered. We were the first men from outside
they had seen in four months, and that was the extent of their interest
or information. They had put on their best clothes, and were walking
along the track to Colenso to catch a train south to Durban or to
Maritzburg, to any place out of the neutral camp. They might have been
somnambulists for all they saw of us, or of the Boer trenches and the
battle-field before them. But we found them of greatest interest,
especially their clean clothes. Our column had not seen clean linen in
six weeks, and the sight of these civilians in white duck and straw hats,
and carrying walking-sticks, coming toward us over the railroad ties,
made one think it was Sunday at home and these were excursionists to the
suburbs.

We had been riding through a roofless tunnel, with the mountain and the
great dam on one side, and the high wall of the railway cutting on the
other, but now just ahead of us lay the open country, and the exit of the
tunnel barricaded by twisted rails and heaped-up ties and bags of earth.
Bulwana was behind us. For eight miles it had shut out the sig