When Krool saw her first he was fastening the last hook of the traces with swift, trained fingers.  He stood dumfounded for a moment.  The superstitious, half-mystical thing in him came trembling to his eyes; then he saw Stafford’s body, and he realized the situation.  A look of savage hatred came into his face, and he made a step forward with sudden impulse, as though he would spring upon Stafford.  His hand was upon a knife at his belt.  But the horses plunged and strained, and he saw in the near distance a troop of cavalry.

With an obscene malediction at the body, he sprang upon a horse.  A sjambok swung, and with a snort, which was half a groan, the trained horses sprang forward.

“The Rooinek’s gun for Oom Paul!” he shouted back over his shoulder.

Most prisoners would have been content to escape and save their skins, but a more primitive spirit lived in Krool.  Escape was not enough for him.  Since he had been foiled at Brinkwort’s Farm and could not reach Rudyard Byng; since he would be shot the instant he was caught after his escape—­if he was caught—­he would do something to gall the pride of the verdomde English.  The gun which the Boers had not dared to issue forth and take, which the British could not rescue without heavy loss while the battle was at its height—­he would ride it over the hills into the Boers’ camp.

There was something so grotesque in the figure of the half-caste, with his copper-coat flying behind him as the horses galloped away, that a wan smile came to Al’mah’s lips.  With Stafford at her feet in the staring sun she yet could not take her eyes from the man, the horses, and the gun.  And not Al’mah alone shaded and strained eyes to follow the tumbling, bouncing gun.  Rifles, maxims, and pom-poms opened fire upon it.  It sank into a hollow and was partially lost to sight; it rose again and jerked forward, the dust rising behind it like surf.  It swayed and swung, as the horses wildly took the incline of the hills, Krool’s sjambok swinging above them; it struggled with the forces that dragged it higher and higher up, as though it were human and understood that it was a British gun being carried into the Boer lines.

At first a battery of the Boers, fighting a rear-guard action, had also fired on it, but the gunners saw quickly that a single British gun was not likely to take up an advance position and attack alone, and their fire died away.  Thinking only that some daring Boer was doing the thing with a thousand odds against him, they roared approval as the gun came nearer and nearer.

Though the British poured a terrific fire after the flying battery of one gun, there was something so splendid in the episode; the horses were behaving so gallantly,—­horses of one of their own batteries daringly taken by Krool under the noses of the force—­that there was scarcely a man who was not glad when, at last, the gun made a sudden turn at a kopje, and was lost to sight within the Boer lines, leaving behind it a little cloud of dust.