The distance was great, and the rifle-barrel looked no larger than a metal ramrod, but the clearness of the South African air showed it plainly enough; and hugging himself closer together, the young officer laid his cheek close to the stock of his piece, closed his left eye, and glanced along the barrel, waiting for the opportunity he felt sure must come.
The excitement of the moment made his heart beat fast, and his eyes glittered as he gazed; but there was nothing to see now save a beautiful green clump of thorn bush, with the great grey granite block in its midst.
“I make it two hundred and fifty yards good,” he said to himself, and he raised the sight of his rifle. “I ought to be able to hit a steady mark at that distance when cool, and I feel as cool now as a cucumber. They’re grand shots these chaps, and if he can make out my face he’ll bring me down as sure as a gun; and if he does there’s new mourning to be got at home, and a lot of crying, and the old lady and the girls breaking their hearts about stupid old me, so I must have first shot if I can get it. Very stupid of them at home. They don’t know what a fool every one thinks me out here. Nice, though, all the same, and I like ’em—well, love ’em, say—love ’em all too well to let them go breaking their hearts about me; so here goes, Mr Boer. But he doesn’t go. He must be waiting up there, because I saw his gun. What a while he is! Or is it I’m impatient and think the time long? Couldn’t have been mistaken. I’d speak to old Lennox, but if I do it’s a chance if the enemy don’t show and get first shot.”
Dickenson seemed to cease thinking for a few moments, and lay listening to the rattle of the Boers’ guns across the river and the spattering echo-like sounds of the bullets striking around. Then he began to think again, with his eyes fixed upon the top of the grey stone in the distance, and noting now that a clearly-cut shadow from a long strand was cast right across the top of the stone.
“That’s just in front of where his face ought to be when he takes aim,” thought the young officer.—“Aim at me, to put them at home in mourning and make them go to church the next Sunday and hear our old vicar say a kind word for our gallant young friend who died out in the Transvaal. But he sha’n’t if I can help it. Nasty, sneaking, cowardly beggar! I never did him any harm, and I don’t want to do him any harm; but as he means to shoot me dead, why, common-sense seems to say, ‘Have first shot at him, Bobby, old chap, if you can, for you’re only twenty, and as the days of man are seventy years all told, he’s going to do you out of fifty, which would be a dead robbery, of course; and in this case a dead robbery means murder into the bargain.’”
Bob Dickenson’s musings stopped short for a few moments while he looked in vain for some sign of his enemy. Then he went on again in a desultory way, paying no heed to the bullets flying over and around him, and for the time being forgetting all about his comrade, who kept on firing whenever he had an opportunity.
“What a pity it seems!” he mused. “Birds flitting about, bees and butterflies sipping the honey out of the flowers, which are very beautiful; so is this gully, with the sparkling water and ferns and things all a-growing and a-blowing, as they say. Why, I should like nothing better than loafing round here enjoying myself by looking about and doing no harm to anything. I wouldn’t even catch the fish if I wasn’t so hungry; and yet, here I am with a magazine-rifle trying to shoot a Boer dead.
“Humph! yes,” he continued after a short pause; “but only so that he sha’n’t shoot me dead. This is being a soldier, this is. Why was I such a fool as to be one? The uniform and the band and the idea of being brave and all that sort of thing, I suppose. Rather different out here. No band; no uniform but this dirt-coloured khaki; no bed to sleep on; no cover but the tent; roasting by day, freezing by night: hardly a chance to wash one’s self, and nothing to eat; and no one to look at you but the Boers, and when they come to see what the soldiers of the Queen are like they send word they are there with bullets, bless ’em! Well, I suppose it’s all right. We must have soldiers, and I wanted to be one, and now I am one there does seem to be something more than the show in doing one’s duty bravely, as they call it.
“Well,” he muttered at last, “this is getting monotonous, and I’m growing tired of it. If they do shoot us both, they’ll have had to pay for it. Why, they must have used a couple of hundred cartridges. Not very good work for such crack shots as they are said to be. If they spend a hundred cartridges to shoot one buck, it would come cheaper to buy their meat.
“All fancy,” he muttered directly after; “that fellow couldn’t have been going where I thought, and yet it seemed so likely. There’s the clump of trees, and the very stone a fellow would make for to rest his rifle on when he took aim from his snug hiding-place. But there’s no one there. The sun shines right upon it, so that I could see in a moment if a Boer was there. His face would be just beyond that shadow cast so clearly by what must be a dead bough. Yes, all a fancy of mine.”