stake I could not guess. There are many gentlemen
rankers in this war.

He made a lonely figure in the night, his helmet marking him as
conspicuously as a man wearing a high hat in a church. From the
billiard-room, where the American scouts were playing pool, came the
click of the ivory and loud, light-hearted laughter; from the veranda the
sputtering of many strange tongues and the deep, lazy voices of the
Boers. There were Boers to the left of him, Boers to the right of him,
pulling at their long, drooping pipes and sending up big rings of white
smoke in the white moonlight.

He dismounted, and stood watching the crowd about him under half-lowered
eyelids, but as unmoved as though he saw no one. He threw his arm over
the pony's neck and pulled its head down against his chest and began
talking to it.

It was as though he wished to emphasize his loneliness.

"You are not tired, are you? No, you're not," he said. His voice was as
kindly as though he were speaking to a child.

"Oh, but you can't be tired. What?" he whispered. "A little hungry,
perhaps. Yes?" He seemed to draw much comfort from his friend the pony,
and the pony rubbed his head against the Englishman's shoulder.

"The commandant says he will question you in the morning. You will come
with us to the jail now," his captor directed. "You will find three of
your people there to talk to. I will go bring a blanket for you, it is
getting cold." And they rode off together into the night.

Two days later he would have heard through the windows of Jones's Hotel
the billiard balls still clicking joyously, but the men who held the cues
then would have worn helmets like his own.

The original Jones, the proprietor of Jones's Hotel, had fled. The man
who succeeded him was also a refugee, and the present manager was an
American from Cincinnati. He had never before kept a hotel, but he
confided to me that it was not a bad business, as he found that on each
drink sold he made a profit of a hundred per cent. The proprietress was
a lady from Brooklyn, her husband, another American, was a prisoner with
Cronje at St. Helena. She was in considerable doubt as to whether she
ought to run before the British arrived, or wait and chance being made a
prisoner. She said she would prefer to escape, but what with standing on
her feet all day in the kitchen preparing meals for hungry burghers and
foreign volunteers, she was too tired to get away.

War close at