Barry Whalen made to leave, then turned back.  Rudyard understood.  They clasped hands.  It was the grip of men who knew each other—­knew each other’s faults and weaknesses, yet trusted with a trust which neither disaster nor death could destroy.

“My girl—­if anything happens to me,” Barry said.

“You may be sure—­as if she were my own,” was Rudyard’s reply.  “If I go down, find my wife at the Stay Awhile Hospital.  Tell her that the day I married her was the happiest day of my life, and that what I said then I thought at the last.  Everything else is straightened out—­and I’ll not forget your girl, Barry.  She shall be as my own if things should happen that way.”

“God bless you, old man,” whispered Barry.  “Goodbye.”  Then he recovered himself and saluted.  “Is that all, sir?”

“Au revoir, Barry,” came the answer; then a formal return of the salute.  “That is all,” he added brusquely.

They moved forward to the regiment, and the word to dismount was given softly.  When the forces crept forward again, it was as infantrymen, moving five paces apart, and feeling their way up to the Boer trenches.

Dawn.  The faintest light on the horizon, as it were a soft, grey glimmer showing through a dark curtain.  It rises and spreads slowly, till the curtain of night becomes the veil of morning, white and kind.  Then the living world begins to move.  Presently the face of the sun shines through the veil, and men’s bodies grow warm with active being, and the world stirs with busy life.  On the veld, with the first delicate glow, the head of a meerkat, or a springbok, is raised above the gray-brown grass; herds of cattle move uneasily.  Then a bird takes flight across the whitening air, another, and then another; the meerkat sits up and begs breakfast of the sun; lizards creep out upon the stones; a snake slides along obscenely foraging.  Presently man and beast and all wild things are afoot or a-wing, as though the world was new-created; as though there had never been any mornings before, and this was not the monotonous repetition of a million mornings, when all things living begin the world afresh.

But nowhere seems the world so young and fresh and glad as on the sun-warmed veld.  Nowhere do the wild roses seem so pure, or are the aloes so jaunty and so gay.  The smell of the karoo bush is sweeter than attar, and the bog-myrtle and mimosa, where they shelter a house or fringe a river, have a look of Arcady.  It is a world where any mysterious thing may happen—­a world of five thousand years ago—­the air so light, so sweetly searching and vibrating, that Ariel would seem of the picture, and gleaming hosts of mailed men, or vast colonies of green-clad archers moving to virgin woods might belong.  Something frightens the timid spirit of a springbok, and his flight through the grass is like a phrase of music on a wilful adventure; a bird hears the sighing of the breeze in the mimosa leaves or the swaying shrubs, and in disdain of such slight performance flings out a song which makes the air drunken with sweetness.