a laager of
waggons built up with sacks full of earth, and further protected from
assault by a twenty or thirty yards' entanglement of barbed wire with
a sprinkling of broken bottles on the ground. The eight hundred men
were organised in troops, and were armed and horsed in an incredibly
short space of time.

Outside the town, on the north, south, and east, lay more than seven
thousand Matabele, two thousand of whom were armed with Martini-Henry
rifles, while the others possessed Lee-Metfords, elephant guns, Tower
muskets, and blunderbusses, besides their own native assegais,
knobkerries, and battle-axes. This formidable force was further
strengthened by the desertion of a hundred Native Police, who took
with them to the enemy their Winchester repeaters. Thus it will be
seen that all the odds were in favour of the Matabele, but it is only
when the odds are overwhelming against him that the Englishman feels
he must buck up, and Buluwayo was fortunate enough to possess men of
the true breed. Among these let us make special mention of the Hon.
Maurice Gifford, who lost an arm in a gallant dash upon the
besiegers[1]--a man "for whom rough miners and impetuous cowboys work
like well-broken hounds"; Mr. F.C. Selous, hunter and explorer;
Colonel Napier, and Captain MacFarlane. These men gave the enemy no
rest, and by repeated attacks at last rid the town of any immediate
danger of being rushed by the blacks.

Baden-Powell's work when he arrived was almost entirely confined to
the office; and working at a desk from early morning to late at night,
with no prospect of an early closing movement, began to tell upon his
spirits. He became convinced that "our force is far too small
adequately to cope with so numerous and fairly well-armed an enemy,
with well-nigh impregnable strongholds to fall back on.... Our force,
bold as it is, is far too small, and yet we cannot increase it by a
man, for the simple reason that if we did we could not find the
wherewithal to feed it." If this sort of thing had gone on much longer
B.-P. might have learned to look glum for an entire five minutes; but
one night at ten o'clock, when he and Sir Frederick Carrington were
putting up the shutters of office, into the town rode Burnham, the
famous American scout, with news of a large impi of the enemy about
three miles outside Buluwayo. This necessitated action, and B.-P. was
himself again. With a police-trooper as a guide he rode out to find
for himsel