y than eight miles, our usefulness to the people who
paid us our salaries was at an end.

While waiting for an answer to this we were led out to see another
battle. Either that we might not miss one minute of it, or that we
should be too sleepy to see anything of it, we were started in black
darkness, at three o'clock in the morning, the hour, as we are told, when
one's vitality is at its lowest, and one which should be reserved for the
exclusive use of burglars and robbers of hen roosts. Concerning that
hour I learned this, that whatever its effects may be upon human beings,
it finds a horse at his most strenuous moment. At that hour by the light
of three paper lanterns we tried to saddle eighteen horses, donkeys, and
ponies, and the sole object of each was to kick the light out of the
lantern nearest him. We finally rode off through a darkness that was
lightened only by a gray, dripping fog, and in a silence broken only by
the patter of rain upon the corn that towered high above our heads and
for many miles hemmed us in. After an hour, Sataki, the teacher who
acted as our guide, lost the trail and Captain Lionel James, of the
_Times_, who wrote "On the Heels of De Wet," found it for him. Sataki,
so our two other keepers told us, is an authority on international law,
and he may be all of that and know all there is to know of three-mile
limits and paper blockades, but when it came to picking up a trail, even
in the bright sunlight when it lay weltering beneath his horse's
nostrils, we always found that any correspondent with an experience of a
few campaigns was of more general use. The trail ended at a muddy hill,
a bare sugar-loaf of a hill, as high as the main tent of a circus and as
abruptly sloping away. It was swept by a damp, chilling wind; a mean,
peevish rain washed its sides, and they were so steep that if we sat upon
them we tobogganed slowly downward, ploughing up the mud with our boot
heels. Hungry, sleepy, in utter darkness, we clung to this slippery
mound in its ocean of whispering millet like sailors wrecked in mid-sea
upon a rock, and waited for the day. After two hours a gray mist came
grudgingly, trees and rocks grew out of it, trenches appeared at our
feet, and what had before looked like a lake of water became a mud
village.

Then, like shadows, the foreign attaches, whom we fondly hoped might turn
out to be Russian Cossacks coming to take us prisoners and carry us off
to breakfast, rode u