e more rugged, the curves of his lips a bit more
resolute; but that was all.

Now and then, amid the merry group at the camp fire, he sat silent,
while he let his mind range away to the southward. Somewhere there,
in the green-ringed town in the mountain's shelter, was a tall girl
with yellow hair and eyes which matched the zenith when it darkens
after the dropping of the sun. His fancy painted her in every
conceivable situation: walking, riding, resting at noonday in the
shaded western end of the veranda, or pouring tea for relays of
thirsty guests. As a rule, the Captain's figure was in the
background of these pictures, and Weldon was content to have it so.
In all South Africa, these were his two best friends; it was good
that they could be together. And the Captain was an older man, much
older. When one lives in the open air during twenty-four hours of
every day, jealousy has scant place in his mind. The smaller vices
are for the cramped town, not for the limitless, unbroken veldt.

And now and then a day brought with it a letter, frank, friendly and
full of news. Those days Weldon marked with a white stone; but his
sleep, on those nights, was as quiet and dreamless as ever. Facts
were facts. Theories and hopes were for the future; and no man looks
much to the future in a time of war.

Besides the letters, there were minor events, too, events which went
to fill up the letters of reply. Now it was a hospital train which
halted at the camp on the way southward, and each red-taped nurse
had reminded him of Alice Mellen, and of those last days in
Johannesburg. Now it was a two-day trek, as escort for a convoy
train whose long lines of bullock-drawn wagons marked the brown
veldt with a wavering stripe of duller brown. Again a wounded picket
came straying back to camp, bleeding and dazed, to report the
inevitable sniping which furnished the running accompaniment to most
other events; or an angry squad came riding in, to tell of the shots
which had followed close upon the raising of the white flag, or of
the score of armed men who had suddenly leaped out from the safe
shelter of a Red-Cross ambulance. And, on one occasion, he had been
in the thick of a similar fray. Hand to hand, he had fought on the
doorsteps of a farmhouse to which he and his five comrades had been
bidden by a sprightly Boer in gown and sunbonnet. At the door, the
bonnet had been cast from the cropped head, and the gown had been
pushed back to give ac