On the Firing Line Part 8

"Sure, Captain, I put a condition on the tail of it. If you'll remember back a little, you'll see that I merely said, 'when I get a rifle instead of a spoon.' It's a sorry day for an able-bodied man to be tied to a frying pan all his days. Now and then he longs to leap out and get into the fire."

Meanwhile, half of the men inside the church were volunteering for the party of twenty guards demanded by the Captain. It was a surly night, cold and raw with a drizzling rain. Nevertheless, this was their first approach to anything even remotely resembling active service, and the men sought it eagerly.

By dint of attaching himself to the Captain's elbow and a.s.suming that his going was an understood thing, Weldon accomplished his aim.

Eleven o'clock found him, wet to his skin, sneaking on the points of his toes through the thick gra.s.s beyond the river, with nineteen other men sneaking at his heels. There had been no especial pretext of Boers in the neighborhood; tactical thoroughness merely demanded a guard on the farther side of the river. Nevertheless, the enthusiastic fellows threw themselves into the game with the same spirit with which, twenty years before, they had faced the danger of a runaway by the tandem of rampant hall chairs. A stray Boer or two would have made an interesting diversion; but, even without the Boers, a night guard in the open possessed its own interest.

By four in the morning, the interest had waned perceptibly. The establishment of their force in a convenient hut and the placing of pickets had served to occupy an hour or so. After that, nothing happened. The storm was increasing. The rain beat ceaselessly on the corrugated iron roof of their shelter and made a dreary ba.s.s accompaniment to the strident tenor of the rising wind. Inside the but the men yawned and whispered together by turns. Carew's best jokes began to fall a little flat, and Weldon held his watch to his ear, to a.s.sure himself that it was still in active service. Then hastily he thrust the watch into his pocket, gathered up his sleeping-bag and removed himself to a remote corner of the hut, with Carew and a dozen more after him.

Not even the most enthusiastic champion of South African rights can affirm that the South African citizen is heedful of the condition of his lesser buildings. The rising wind had proved too much for the hut. Its joints writhed a little, seesawed up and down a little, then yawned like a weary old man. From a dozen points above, the rain came pattering down, seeking with unerring instinct that precise spot on each man's back where skin and collar meet.

"Whither?" Carew queried, as Weldon made his fifth move.

"Outside, to see what the pickets are about."

"But it rains," Carew protested lazily.

"So I observe. Still, I'd rather take it outside as it comes, instead of having a gutter empty itself on me, when I am supposed to be under cover."

"Better stay in," Carew advised him.

"No use. Sleep is out of the question, and I'd rather be moving; it is less monotonous."

"Go along, then, and look out for Boers. Can I have your bag?"

"You're too wet; you'd soak up all the inside of it. If I am to get a chill, I'd rather do it from my dampness than your own." Carew laid hands on the bag.

"What a selfish beast you are, Weldon!" he observed tranquilly.

"This is no sack-race; you can't go out to walk in your bag. In fact, it takes two to make a navigable pair. Then why not let me have it?"

"Why didn't you bring your own?"

Already Carew was arranging himself in his new covering.

"I mislaid mine in Cape Town," he replied sleepily. "Now please go away. I need my beauty nap."

An hour later, he was roused by a sharp reversal of his normal position. When he became fully awake, he was lying in a pool of water in the middle of the hut, and Weldon was in possession of the blankets and bag.

"What's the row?" he asked thickly. "I'm a Canadian, out here shooting Boers. Oh, I say!" And he was on his feet, saluting the man at Weldon's side.

"The only bag in the squadron, Captain Frazer," Weldon was explaining. "The blankets are quite dry. Roll yourself up, and you will be warm in a few minutes."

Carew surveyed the transfer with merry, impartial eyes.

"Well, I like that," he said, when the Captain's yellow head was all that was visible above the encircling coc.o.o.n. "I thought you said that you preferred to catch cold from your own wetness, Weldon. I was merely damp; this man is a sponge."

Before Weldon could answer, the yellow head turned, and the blue eyes looked up into Carew's eyes laughingly.

"Merely one of the privileges of rank, Carew," the Captain observed as dryly as if he had not risen from his warm bed to swim the river and walk a mile in the darkness and the downpour, in order to see how the new boys were getting on.

CHAPTER SIX

Captain Leo Frazer, age thirty and an Englishman, had a trick of looking Fate between the eyes with those black-fringed blue eyes of his, of accepting its gifts with grat.i.tude, its occasional knocks with cheery optimism. At Rugby he had ultimately been captain of the school; at Oxford he had been of equal prowess in rowing and football. Since taking his degree, he had been a successful doctor in the intervals of time allowed him by his membership in one of the crack regiments at home. He had never seriously contemplated the possibility of active service; but Colenso had been too strong a pull upon him. Leaving some scores of sorrowing patients to bemoan him as already dead, he had promptly shipped for Cape Town. The year of grace nineteen hundred had found him on the scene at most of its exciting events. Where Fate refused to take him, he a.s.serted his strong hand and took Fate, until that weary lady was forced to go hopping about the map of South Africa with the agility of a sand flea.

In battle, Frazer was always in the thickest spatter of bullets, where he bowed himself to the inevitable and lay p.r.o.ne, though with his face turned to one side to give free pa.s.sage to the chaff which carried his comrades through so many grim hours. In the presence of danger, his humor never failed him. In those sorrowful hours which followed the cessation of firing, no man was in greater demand than he. Many a brave fellow had died with his hand shut fast over Frazer's long, slim fingers; many a man's first, awful moments in hospital had been soothed by the touch of those same firm, slim hands. And in the singsongs around the camp fire, or at the mess table, Frazer's voice was always heard, no matter how great the tumult of a moment before.

Like many another of his countrymen, Captain Frazer had learned lessons since he had left the ship at Cape Town, just a year before.

He had come out from England, trained to the inflexibly formal tactics of the British army. Again and again he had seen those tactics proved of no avail in the face of an invisible enemy and an almost inexpugnable country. He had learned the nerve-racking tension of being exposed to a storm of bullets that came apparently from nowhere to cut down the British lines as the hail cuts down the standing grain; he had learned the shock of seeing the level veldt, over which he was marching, burst into a line of fire at his very feet from a spot where it seemed that scarce a dozen men could lie in hiding, to say nothing of a dozen scores. He had learned that, under such fire, a man's first duty was to drop flat on his face, to push up a tiny breastwork of earth and to fire from behind that slender shelter. England could not afford to send her sons over seas for the sake of having them slaughtered by needless obedience to the laws of martial good form. Fighting a nation of hunters, they too must adopt the methods of the hunt. And, most of all, Captain Frazer had learned the imperative need of mounted riflemen. Two months before, while lying up at Durban until his wrist had healed from a Mauser bullet, he had come into close contact with the Marquis of Tullibardine. As a result of that contact, January had found Captain Frazer in Cape Town, ready to take command of the newly enlisted Scottish Horse.

Now, as he looked over his force at Piquetberg Road, he was congratulating himself that his men were fit for service, very fit.

Frazer knew something of men. Experience had a.s.sured him that these men were worth training and his months of service under the great Field Marshal had taught him that an officer could be a man among his men, yet lose not one jot of his dignity. Accordingly, Frazer set himself to the task in band. By the time he had been at Piquetberg Road for two days, he knew the name and face of every man in his squadron. A week later he could tell to a nicety which of his men were engaged to girls at home, which of them had heard of one Rudyard Kipling, and which of them could be counted upon in an emergency. The two latter counts Weldon filled absolutely. In regard to the first, Frazer permitted himself a moment of acute uneasiness.

It had been in a spirit of unmitigated joy that Frazer had met Ethel Dent in Cape Town, on the morning of New Year's day. In London he had known the girl just well enough to admire her intensely, not well enough, however, to have found out that she had any permanent connection with South Africa. His joy had lasted until the hour of his calling upon her, three days later; then it had received a sudden check. Ethel had been as cordial as ever; nevertheless, her talk had been full of the young Canadian whom he had met in the drive. Frazer was intensely human. After a year of separation he would have preferred to bound the talk by the experiences of their two selves.

As a natural consequence, he had developed a strong prejudice against Weldon; but Weldon, all unconsciously, had done much to remove that prejudice. Not every man could manage a crazy, bucking broncho in any such fashion as that; fewer still could come out of the scrimmage, unhurt, to bow to a young woman with a cordiality quite untinged with boyish bravado. That day at Maitland, Frazer had registered his mental approval of the long-legged, lean Canadian with his keen gray eyes and his wrists of bronze. He had registered a second note of approval, that first night at Piquetberg Road, when Weldon, with no unnecessary words, had contrived to impress upon the mind of his captain that he was to be included in the guard to cross the river. Totally obedient and respectful, Weldon nevertheless had given the impression of a man who intended to win his own way.

Moreover, the direction of that way appeared to be straight towards the front.

Meanwhile, peacefully unconscious of this diagnosis, Weldon was sitting on the river bank, prosaically occupied in scooping out the remaining taste left in an almost-empty jam tin. Beside him, Carew was similarly occupied. Two more jam tins were between them and, exactly opposite the pair of jam tins, there squatted a burly Kaffir, young, alert and crowned with a thatch of hair which by rights should have sprouted from the back of a sable pig. His mouth was slightly open, and now and then his tongue licked out, like the tongue of an eager dog. Aside from his hair, his costume consisted of one black sock worn in lieu of m.u.f.fler and a worn pair of khaki trousers.

Behind him, the river caught the sunset light and turned it to a sheet of flowing copper; beyond stretched the open country in long, waving lines that ended in the deep yellow band of the afterglow.

Above them, the sky was blue; but it dropped from the blue zenith to the yellow horizon through every imaginable shade of emerald and topaz until all other shades lost themselves in one vivid blaze of burnt orange. It had been a day of intense heat. Already, however, the falling twilight and the inevitable eastward shift of the wind had brought the first hint of the evening chill.

Weldon shrugged his shoulders.

"Hurry up, Carew," he adjured his companion. "I am for leaving our feast and hieing us back to the sanctuary."

"Right, oh!" Carew raised his jam tin and took careful aim at a rock in mid stream.

Instantly the Kaffir hitched forward.

"Mine?" he demanded.

Carew stayed his arm.

"What for?"

"Eat. Um good."

"Nothing in there but atmosphere, sonny. You can get that out of any box. Suppose I can hit that little black point, Weldon?"

"Not if I know it," Weldon said coolly, as he tossed his own tin to the boy and, seizing that of Carew, threw it after its mate. "Let the little c.o.o.n have his lick, Carew. It's not pretty to watch him go at it, tongue first; but we can't all be Chesterfields. What is your name, sonny?"

The boy paused with suspended tongue, while he rolled the great whites of his eyes up at the questioner. Then, the whites still turned upon Weldon, he took one more hasty lick.

"Kruger Roberts," he said then, detaching himself for an instant from his treasure. "Oh, I infer you like to sit on fences?" Weldon said interrogatively.

"Ya, Boss."