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, sloughing it, Fielding thought, or better still, burning through it as through a crust of lava; his eyes—­eyes which listened, Fielding had not inaptly described them—­now spoke, and spoke vigorously; enthusiasm, too, rode on his voice, deepening its tones—­not enthusiasm of the febrile kind which sends the speech wavering up and down the scale, but enthusiasm with sobriety as its dominant note concentrated into a level flow of sound.  His description had all the freshness of an immediate occurrence.  Compared with the ordinary style of reminiscence it was the rose upon the tree to the dried leaves of a potpourri.

‘But,’ said Fielding, unconsciously resisting the influence which Drake exerted, ’I thought you took a whole army of blacks with you on these expeditions?’