After I had been in hospital a little while, the matron gave me leave to prowl about to pick up “copy,” and my feet soon led me into the ward where the wounded Dutchmen were lying, and there I met a couple of burghers who had been in the melee when Dowling was gathered in.  One of them was a handsome Swede, with a long blonde moustache, that fell with a glorious sweep on to his chest, as the Viking’s did of old.  He was an adventurer, who knew how to take his gruel like a man.  He had joined the Boers because he thought they were the weaker side, and had done his best for them.  He saw Dowling talking to me one day, and asked me if I knew the “little devil.”  “Yes,” I replied, “we are countrymen.”  “Americans?” he asked.  “No, Australians.”  He raised himself on his elbow, whilst I propped his shoulders up with pillows, and as he remained thus he gazed admiringly at the slight, boyish figure which limped lazily through the ward.  “What a little tiger cat he is,” muttered the recumbent giant.  “I thought we’d have to kill him before we got him, and that would have been a shame, for I hate to kill brave men when they have no chance.”  “Tell me about it,” I said.  “He won’t give me any information himself, only tells me he ’stopped a few.’” The big, handsome Swede laughed a mighty laugh under his great blonde moustache.

“Stopped a few, did he?  If all your fellows fought it out to the bitter end as he did, we should run short of ammunition before the war was very old.”

A Boer nurse came over and asked us “what nonsense we made one with the other, that we did laugh to ourselves like two hens clucking over one egg.”  The blonde giant turned his joyous blue eyes upon her, and paid her a compliment which caused her to bridle, whilst the blood swept like a race-horse in its stride over neck, and cheek, and brow, causing her dainty, girlish face to look prettier than ever.  “Ah, little Eckhardt,” he whispered, and then murmured something in Dutch.  I did not understand the words, but there was something in the sound of the adventurer’s voice which conjured up a moonlit garden, a rose-crowned gate swinging on one hinge, a girl on one side and a fool on the other.  The nurse tossed her pretty head with its wealth of jet black hair, and as she smoothed his pillows with infinite care she murmured:  “Fighting and making love, making love and fighting—­it is all one to you, Karl.  I know you, you big pirate; you are as a hen that lays away from home.”  And with that round of shrapnel she left us.

Karl got rid of a fourteen-pound sigh, which sounded like the bursting of a lyddite shell.  Then he slipped his hand under his pillow and drew forth a flask of “Dop.”  “Drink to her,” he said.  “To whom?” I asked, falling in with the humour of the man.  “To the girl I love,” he muttered like a schoolboy.  “Which one, Karl?” I asked, and I laughed as I spoke.  He snatched the brandy from my hand, lifted the flask to his lips, and drank deeply.