irty-five thousand men, were a few miles
distant from the opposite bank of the Sand River. There was an equal
chance that the English would attempt to cross at the drift or at the
bridge. We thought they would cross at the drift, and stopped for the
night at Ventersburg, a town ten miles from the river.

Ventersburg, in comparison with Kroonstad, where we had left them
rounding up stray burghers and hurrying them to the firing-line, and
burning official documents in the streets, was calm.

Ventersburg was not destroying incriminating documents nor driving weary
burghers from its solitary street. It was making them welcome at Jones's
Hotel. The sun had sunk an angry crimson, the sure sign of a bloody
battle on the morrow, and a full moon had turned the dusty street and the
veldt into which it disappeared into a field of snow.

The American scouts had halted at Jones's Hotel, and the American
proprietor was giving them drinks free. Their cowboy spurs jingled on
the floor of the bar-room, on the boards of the verandas, on the stone
floor of the kitchen, and in the billiard-room, where they were playing
pool as joyously as though the English were not ten miles away. Grave,
awkward burghers rode up, each in a cloud of dust, and leaving his pony
to wander in the street and his rifle in a corner, shook hands with every
one solemnly, and asked for coffee. Italians of Garibaldi's red-shirted
army, Swedes and Danes in semi-uniform, Frenchman in high boots and great
sombreros, Germans with the sabre cuts on their cheeks that had been
given them at the university, and Russian officers smoking tiny
cigarettes crowded the little dining-room, and by the light of a smoky
lamp talked in many tongues of Spion Kop, Sannahspost, Fourteen Streams,
and the battle on the morrow.

They were sun-tanned, dusty, stained, and many of them with wounds in
bandages. They came from every capital of Europe, and as each took his
turn around the crowded table, they drank to the health of every nation,
save one. When they had eaten they picked up the pony's bridle from the
dust and melted into the moonlight with a wave of the hand and a "good
luck to you." There were no bugles to sound "boots and saddles" for
them, no sergeants to keep them in hand, no officers to pay for their
rations and issue orders.

Each was his own officer, his conscience was his bugle-call, he gave
himself orders. They were all equal, all friends; the cowboy and the