He seemed to diminish as he advanced slowly from the mirage, but still he looked uncommonly big—and venerable, too. His hair and beard grew long and white, though he sat up as alert as any young man. At ten yards a pack-pony followed him. When half a mile away the burgher raised both hands above his head.
"He come for surrender, you t'ink, sergeant?" Lieutenant Deschamps is a gentleman. Because I was of another race he always treated me with more than the consideration due to a good non-com. Or possibly it was because he knew I had been advocate in Montreal before joining the mounted Canadian contingent.
"Better keep down and keep him covered," I replied. "That may be a signal." I stared about the horizon. The veldt was bare, except for the straggle of hackthorns fringing the curve about the ford. There could be no other Boer within three miles of us, unless hidden by the meanderings of the Wolwe, which runs twelve feet below the plain. But we had searched ten miles of its bed during the day. Westward lay the kopjes from among which the old Boer had apparently ridden.
He came calmly down the breach of the opposite bank and as far as the middle of the brawling shallow within fifty yards of us before Deschamps cried "Halt!" At the word we sprang up, accoutrements rattling, horses snorting. The old burgher looked up at us quizzically, passing his hand down his beard and gathering its length above his mouth before he spoke.
"Take care some of those guns don't go off," he said, with no trace of Dutch accent.
"You surrender?" Deschamps stepped forward.
"Sir, I am going to Swartzdorp. Did you not see me hold up my hands?"
"But for sure you could not see us here?"
He smiled and pointed up to the sky. In the blue a vulture swung wide above us. "So I knew," said the burgher, "Khakis were hiding. Boers would have come out. They would have recognized me."
"Your name?"