Here and there the sheep had not been driven off, but cropped placidly at the plentiful pasturage. Mortimer's heart went out to the brown soft things.
On and on he rode, finding his way with a bushman's instinct for the right path.
The sky grew grey and more grey.
Up from the west rolled a great woollen cloud that drooped lower and lower till it burst with a sudden fury over the land, as if shrapnel shells charged with hail had exploded in mid-air. Mortimer put up his collar, and ducked his head to the heavy ice-drops that struck him on every side. He looked in vain for shelter; the veldt rolled smooth and gently undulating in all directions, and no tree was anywhere. To the left a kopje loomed in the darkness ahead, to the right he had seen when on the last rise the white gleaming palings and lights of a farm. He pulled his watch out, and just made out in the rapidly falling darkness that it was eight o'clock. His colonel had advised him to camp for the night somewhere, lest he should lose his way in the darkness, and start off again at earliest dawn. He rapidly resolved to make the farm his halting-place, should, as was most likely, it prove to be unoccupied. The rumour that two lines of defence would join across this part of the country had swiftly cleared the sparsely occupied place. The thought of camping among the rocks of the kopje he did not entertain, having by this the same firmly rooted distrust of that kind of geological formation that the British soldier will carry henceforth in all ages. He forced his plunging horse along; the terrified beast was trembling in every limb with fright at the blinding lightning.
The sound of voices on the road made him push forward harder than ever, his hand going swiftly to the pocket that held his revolver; then he found it was women's voices he heard, a woman's cry of anguish came after him. He wheeled his horse round, and went back slowly, almost feeling his way in the darkness.
A flash of lightning showed him a cart with a fallen horse, an old man, and three girls.
'What's wrong?' he asked.
The old man began to explain rapidly in Dutch, but a girl who was stooping over the horse rose up and came to him.
'Our horse has been struck,' she said in perfectly good English; 'one wheel was struck too, and blazed for a minute, but the rain has put it out.'
'Are none of you hurt?' said Mortimer.