Chapter Eighteen.
The Ordeal.
It was just the dark hour before dawn when Sandgate called a halt.
“We might safely do half an hour’s snooze here,” he said. “The gees want that amount of rest. You turn in, Selmes, and I’ll do horse-guard. No—no—don’t wrangle, man; each minute of that means so much less hard-earned snooze; besides, I’m in command here. Stokes, you look done too. Well, off you go, both of you.”
The latter, with a cavernous yawn, was off like a log. Dick, with a sleepy laugh, followed suit. Then Sandgate, loosening the girths, but not off-saddling, allowed the horses to graze, their bridles trailing on the ground, and set to work to watch.
The place in which they had halted was among some broken rocks, a small hollow, in feet, and admirably adapted for a hiding-place. The back was overhung by boulders, and in front, beyond a lip of the same, the ground fell away in a rugged slope to the bottom of a deep bushy kloof. To Sandgate, left to his lonely vigil, that brief half-hour seemed long enough. To the other two, heavy in slumber, it was as a flash.
“Now then, Selmes. Time,” he whispered, with a hand on the other’s shoulder. In a trice Dick was up, but yawning pathetically. He shivered too, for a thin damp mist was stealing athwart the rocks and bush sprays.
“All serene,” he said, ready and alert. “Kick up the other fellow.”
But although this was done, and that literally, for all the effect it produced Stokes might as well have been dead, or a bit of timber. And then, as an acrid fume rose poisonous upon the cold morning air, Sandgate stood aghast with wrath and horror. His colleague and subordinate was drunk—dead drunk.
Yet how? In a moment something of the truth flashed across his brain. That wretched trader’s store they had passed! Stokes must have found grog in there, which had been overlooked by the plunderers. His cursed instinct had moved him to go inside and explore. There was no sign of any bottle about Stokes, certainly, but this he would have been slim enough to drop unseen and unheard. Now the mystery of his lagging behind stood explained.