. You are given to
heaping matters, I see, which is a bad habit in one so young. I will
answer one of your questions, the last one. I command this column: and
now you will answer me. What columns are in Hopetown?"

_S. O._ "Sorry, sir, but----"

_B._ "Don't apologise. I know I don't look like a general, but it
doesn't help you out of your difficulties to say so. You only slip
into it worse every time; now, then, to the columns?"

_S. O._ "Knox's, Pilcher's, Plumer's, and Paris's."

_B._ "Good; and what is the latest news about De Wet?"

_S. O._ "He has broken out east across the railway; half his force
went up north and half crossed by Paauwpan or Potfontein."

_B._ "Who are on him?"

_S. O._ "I am not quite sure; but I hear that Haig, Thorneycroft,
Crabbe and Henniker are either following him or trying to cut him
off."

_B._ "And what are four columns doing halted here in this _dorp_?"[36]

_S. O._ "They are all stone cold."

_B._ "The price of losing De Wet. Now, young feller, just you hie back
to _your_ general, Charles Knox, I suppose, and tell him that the New
Cavalry Brigade is coming right in here, but will not worry him long,
as it has orders to be off to-night. (_The youth salutes and goes to
the right-about, while the brigadier continues to his staff_) Just as
well to let Knox know that I am on my own. I must invent a special
mission from Pretoria, otherwise he may seize me like the last fellow,
and the future state of this column might then be worse than the
first."

In the meantime the brigade led down into the noisome basin which
holds Hopetown, and took up temporary quarters on the first patch
against the water into which it could squeeze its long line of
transport. It wedged in between two columns, and the bad condition of
both gave evidence of the severity of the work in which they had
recently been engaged. As columns, when they had first entered upon
the chase after De Wet, they had each been five or six hundred strong;
now, perhaps, between them they could count five hundred mounted men,
while of this number not more than a third were fit to do a
twenty-mile trek at a better pace than a walk. Yet each, three weeks
earlier, had started from the railway newly equipped with remounts.

If any are sufficiently interested to cast about for a reason for the
hopeless state of the columns in the Colony at this period, they may
possibly find in the experiences of the brigade a solution of the
re