a man who could ride, and shoot straight.
From the day I sailed from home, until now, I have been like an
actor walking through a part that some one else has written for him.
I have chosen nothing; it all has been inevitable."

She rose to her feet, and stood leaning on the back of her chair.

"In that case, Mr. Weldon, you must include our meeting in your
scheme of things," she said, with a smile.

His answering smile met her smile with perfect frankness.

"I sometimes wonder if that wasn't the most inevitable part of it
all."

CHAPTER TWELVE

The red-brown veldt stretched away to the sky-line, sixty miles
distant. Level as it looked, it was nevertheless a succession of
softly rolling ridges dotted with clumps of dried sagebrush and
spotted here and there with heaps of black volcanic rocks. Far to
the northward, a thin line of poplars and willows marked the bed of
a river. Beyond that, again, the air was thick with smoke from acres
of burning veldt. The days were full of dust, and the nights were
full of frost; it was the month of June, and winter was upon the
land.

The camp was taking a well-earned rest. For days, the men had swept
over the veldt, following hard on the trail of a Boer general who
only made himself visible now and then by a spatter of bullets, when
his convoy train was delayed at a difficult ford. It had been a week
of playing pussin-the-corner over a charred and dusty land, where
the only roads were trails trodden out to powder by the hoofs of
those that had gone before. Both men and mounts were wellnigh
exhausted, and the officers had decreed a halt.

The strain had been intense. Now, with the relaxing of it, its
memory vanished, and the halt swiftly took upon itself the
appearance of a school holiday. Laughing and chaffing each other,
groups of men loitered here and lounged there, smoking, writing
letters, and taking stout, unlovely stitches in their time-worn
khaki clothing. At one side of the camp was the tent of the mess
sergeant, equipped like a portable species of corner grocery. Near
by, Paddy apparently was in his element, presiding over his
camp-kitchen, a vast bonfire encircled with a dozen iron pots. At the
farther edge of the camp Weldon was umpiring a game of football
between his own squadron and a company of the Derbys. Owing to the
athletic zeal of the hour, it was big-side, and Weldon was too busy
in keeping his eye upon so many players to pay much attention to his