re than an average strain upon a man's
endurance, if it was led through a friendly country. But add to your
difficulties the continual presence of an enemy, outnumbering you
incalculably, always on the alert for you to slacken discipline for a
second, and remember you are not marching to safety, but from it. The
odds against you are increasing all the time, and that not for one or two
days, but for eighty and a hundred. I can assure you, one would hear a
great deal less of the harmlessness of the black, if more people had
experienced that grisly hour before daybreak, when they generally make
their attacks. Your whole force--it's a mere handful--stands under arms
at attention in the dark--and it can be dark on the veld, even in the
open, on a starlight night. The veld seems to drink up and absorb the
light, as though it was so much water trickling on the parched ground.
There you stand! You have thrown out scouts to search the country round
you, but you know for certain that half of them are nodding asleep in
their saddles. For all you know, you may be surrounded on all sides. The
strain of that hour of waiting grows so intense that you actually long to
see the flash of a scout's rifle, and so be certain they are coming, or
to feel the ground shake under you, as they stamp their war-dance half a
mile away. Their battle chant, too, makes an uncanny sound, when it
swells across the veld in the night, but, upon my soul, you almost hear
it with relief.'

Drake stopped and looked round upon faces fixed intently on his own,
faces which mirrored his own absorption in his theme. There was one
exception, however; Mrs. Willoughby sat back in her chair
constraining herself to an attitude of indifference, and as Drake
glanced at her, her lips seemed to be moving as though with the
inward repetition of some word or phrase. Even Fielding was shaken
out of his supermundane quietism.

For the first time he saw revealed the real quality in Drake; he saw
visibly active that force of which, although it had lain hitherto latent,
he had always felt the existence and understood why he had made friends
so quickly, and compelled those friends so perpetually to count with him
in their thoughts. It was not so much in the mere words that Drake
expressed this quality as in the spirit which informed, the voice which
launched them, and the looks which gave them point. His face flashed into
mobility, enthusiasm dispelling its set habit of gravity, sl