lumns were converging, however, from several quarters, and De
Wet had to be at once on the move. On the 26th Dewetsdorp was reoccupied
by General Charles Knox with fifteen hundred men. De Wet had two days'
start, but so swift was Knox that on the 27th he had run him down at
Vaalbank, where he shelled his camp. De Wet broke away, however, and
trekking south for eighteen hours without a halt, shook off the pursuit.
He had with him at this time nearly 8000 men with several guns under
Haasbroek, Fourie, Philip Botha, and Steyn. It was his declared
intention to invade Cape Colony with his train of weary footsore
prisoners, and the laurels of Dewetsdorp still green upon him. He was
much aided in all his plans by that mistaken leniency which had refused
to recognise that a horse is in that country as much a weapon as a
rifle, and had left great numbers upon the farms with which he could
replace his useless animals. So numerous were they that many of the
Boers had two or three for their own use. It is not too much to say that
our weak treatment of the question of horses will come to be recognised
as the one great blot upon the conduct of the war, and that our undue
and fantastic scruples have prolonged hostilities for months, and cost
the country many lives and many millions of pounds.

De Wet's plan for the invasion of the Colony was not yet destined to be
realised, for a tenacious man had set himself to frustrate it. Several
small but mobile British columns, those of Pilcher, of Barker, and
of Herbert, under the supreme direction of Charles Knox, were working
desperately to head him off. In torrents of rain which turned every
spruit into a river and every road into a quagmire, the British horsemen
stuck manfully to their work. De Wet had hurried south, crossed the
Caledon River, and made for Odendaal's Drift. But Knox, after the
skirmish at Vaalbank, had trekked swiftly south to Bethulie, and was now
ready with three mobile columns and a network of scouts and patrols
to strike in any direction. For a few days he had lost touch, but his
arrangements were such that he must recover it if the Boers either
crossed the railroad or approached the river. On December 2nd he had
authentic information that De Wet was crossing the Caledon, and in an
instant the British columns were all off at full cry once more, sweeping
over the country with a front of fifteen miles. On the 3rd and 4th, in
spite of frightful weather, the two little armie