advancing. The Boers were moving all about him,
and cut him off from his own side. He had to choose between abandoning
the English to the trap or signalling to them, and so exposing himself
to capture. With the red kerchief the scouts carried for that purpose he
wigwagged to the approaching soldiers to turn back, that the enemy were
awaiting them. But the column, which was without an advance guard, paid
no attention to his signals and plodded steadily on into the ambush,
while Burnham was at once made prisoner. In the fight that followed he
pretended to receive a wound in the knee and bound it so elaborately
that not even a surgeon would have disturbed the carefully arranged
bandages. Limping heavily and groaning with pain, he was placed in
a trek wagon with the officers who really were wounded, and who, in
consequence, were not closely guarded. Burnham told them who he was and,
as he intended to escape, offered to take back to head-quarters their
names or any messages they might wish to send to their people. As
twenty yards behind the wagon in which they lay was a mounted guard, the
officers told him escape was impossible. He proved otherwise. The trek
wagon was drawn by sixteen oxen and driven by a Kaffir boy. Later in the
evening, but while it still was moonlight, the boy descended from his
seat and ran forward to belabor the first spans of oxen. This was the
opportunity for which Burnham had been waiting.

Slipping quickly over the driver's seat, he dropped between the two
"wheelers" to the disselboom, or tongue, of the trek wagon. From this he
lowered himself and fell between the legs of the oxen on his back in the
road. In an instant the body of the wagon had passed over him, and while
the dust still hung above the trail he rolled rapidly over into the
ditch at the side of the road and lay motionless.

It was four days before he was able to re-enter the British lines,
during which time he had been lying in the open veldt, and had subsisted
on one biscuit and two handfuls of "mealies," or what we call Indian
corn.

Another time when out scouting he and his Kaffir boy while on foot were
"jumped" by a Boer commando and forced to hide in two great ant-hills.
The Boers went into camp on every side of them, and for two days,
unknown to themselves, held Burnham a prisoner. Only at night did he and
the Cape boy dare to crawl out to breathe fresh air and to eat the food
tablets they carried in their pockets. On five occa