Rude and cruel? Well, perhaps so; but we were in an enemy’s country—the country of a people who had forced a war upon us—and the Colonel had a couple of hundred people waiting to be fed. So we were fed amply, for the farm was amply stocked; and the order the officer left in the old Boer’s hands in return for his curses was ample to recompense him for what had been forcibly taken.
Denham and I slept pretty close to one another in one of the barns that night, revelling in the thick covering of mealie-leaves which formed our bed. Sweet, fresh, and dry, it seemed glorious; but I did not sleep soundly all the time for thinking of what might happen to us during the darkness. Once it was whether the farmer would send on messengers to bring back the Boer party who had preceded us, and give us an unpleasant surprise. Another time, as I lay on my back peering up at the openings in the corrugated-iron roof through which the stars glinted down, I found myself thinking of how horrible it would be if an enemy’s hand thrust in a lighted brand; and in imagination I dwelt upon the way the dry Indian-corn leaves would burst into a roaring furnace of fire, in which some of us must perish before we could fight our way out. It was not a pleasant series of thoughts to trouble one in the dead of the night, and just then I heard a sigh.
“Awake, Denham?” I whispered.
“Yes—horribly,” he replied. “I say, smell that?”
“What?” I replied, feeling startled.
“Some idiot’s lit his pipe, and we shall all be burned in our—beds, I was going to say: I mean in this mealie straw.”
“I can’t smell it,” I said.
“What! Haven’t you got any nose?”
“Yes: I smell it now,” I said; “but it’s some one outside—one of the sentries, I think.”
“Don’t feel sure—do you?”