ing carried into the Boer lines.

At first a battery of the Boers, fighting a rear-guard action, had also
fired on it, but the gunners saw quickly that a single British gun was
not likely to take up an advance position and attack alone, and their
fire died away. Thinking only that some daring Boer was doing the thing
with a thousand odds against him, they roared approval as the gun came
nearer and nearer.

Though the British poured a terrific fire after the flying battery of
one gun, there was something so splendid in the episode; the horses
were behaving so gallantly,--horses of one of their own batteries
daringly taken by Krool under the noses of the force--that there was
scarcely a man who was not glad when, at last, the gun made a sudden
turn at a kopje, and was lost to sight within the Boer lines, leaving
behind it a little cloud of dust.

Tommy Atkins had his uproarious joke about it, but there was one man
who breathed a sigh of relief when he heard of it. That was Barry
Whalen. He had every reason to be glad that Krool was out of the way,
and that Rudyard Byng would see him no more. Sitting beside the still
unconscious Ian Stafford on the veld, Al'mah's reflections were much
the same as those of Barry Whalen.

With the flight of Krool and the gun came the end of Al'mah's vigil.
The troop of cavalry which galloped out to her was followed by the Red
Cross wagons.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

"PHEIDIPPIDES"

At dawn, when the veld breathes odours of a kind pungency and
fragrance, which only those know who have made it their bed and friend,
the end came to the man who had lain under the gun.

"Pheidippides!" the dying Stafford said, with a grim touch of the
humour which had ever been his. He was thinking of the Greek runner who
brought the news of victory to Athens and fell dead as he told it.

It almost seemed from the look on Stafford's face that, in very truth,
he was laying aside the impedimenta of the long march and the battle,
to carry the news to that army of the brave in Walhalla who had died
for England before they knew that victory was hers.

"Pheidippides," he repeated, and Rudyard Byng, whose eyes were so much
upon the door, watching and waiting for some one to come, pressed his
hand and said: "You know the best, Stafford. So many didn't. They had
to go before they knew."

"I have my luck," Stafford replied, but yet there was a wistful look in
his face.

His eyes slowly closed, and he lay so