Orders meantime come thick and fast from the grim watcher on the rocks above, and troop after troop of Mounted Infantry go scouring away to the attack.  It is a running fight.  Kopje after kopje, as the Boers push on, breaks into fire and is left extinct behind.  But still they keep their flank unbroken and their convoy intact.  For the hundredth time I admire their dogged courage under these, the most trying of all circumstances, the protection of a slow retreat.

So it goes on through the day, and I have great fun galloping about on my own account, looking into things here and there, and watching the general progress of events.  I meet Chester Master again about 5 P.M., and he asks me to ride forthwith to Kimberley with him if Flops can stand it.  All the Boer force has cleared from Magersfontein (our information was all right) and is in retreat on Bloemfontein, and Kitchener is sending word by Chester Master to French, bidding him right turn and march to head off the Boer retreat, while he (Kitchener) hangs on their tail.

An hour later we start; four of us.  Chester Master, myself, May, and a black boy.  It is a twenty-three mile ride.  A full moon is in the sky but clouds obscure it, which is a good thing, as the country is being traversed by stragglers of theirs, leaving the hills and in retreat eastward.  We hear of several such fugitive bodies from our pickets for the first few miles.  Then we are in absolute solitude.  The plain lies bare and blanched around us.  A thorn bush or two sticks up on it, or, now and then, the ghastly shape of a dead horse lying in puffed up relief with legs sticking out stiff and straight and an awful stench blowing from it.  Kimberley’s search-light at stated intervals still swings its spoke over our head.

Six or seven miles out from Kimberley my pony gives out, and Chester Master and May on fresh horses ride on, leaving me the boy.  We plod on, an interesting, delicious ride.  I get off and walk.  A little wind rustles over the dry earth and bushes, but otherwise there is not a whisper of sound.  The landscape at one moment lies white before us as if it had been washed in milk, and the next is blotted out with clouds.  Now and again we pause to listen, and the boy stands like a bronze image of Attention with bent head and held breath, the whites only of his eyes moving as he rolls them from one object to another.  At last from a low kopje top by the path comes the first loud and welcome “Halt!  Who goes there?” of an English picket.  Another two or three miles brings me to an outpost of the town, and there, dead tired and Flops the same, I fling myself on the ground, after hearty greetings and a word or two of talk with the guard, and do a three hours’ sleep till the dawn of the 17th.

In a grey light I rouse myself to look out across the wet misty flat, hearing some one say, “Who’s that?  What force is that?” followed immediately by “Call out the guard; stand to your arms, men.”  But then, as light increases, we see by the regular files and intervals that the force is British, and I know that Chester Master has got in all right and delivered his message, and French already, at a few hours’ notice, is casting back with that terrible cavalry of his after Cronje and the retreating Boers.