“What! blew up the wagons? Yes, sergeant, I suppose we’ve done our work satisfactorily. But do you think the Boers would be hurt?”
“If they were, sir, it was not bad enough to make them stop singing out for help. I heard them quite plainly after the explosions. Can you walk a little faster, sir?”
“Oh yes, I think so. I’m quite right, all but this singing noise in my ears. I say, though, what about the enemy?”
“I don’t know anything about them, sir; the kopje hides them for the present, but once they make out how few we are, I expect they’ll come on with a rush; and the worst of it is, they’re mounted. But it’ll be all right, sir. The colonel said he was sending out a covering party to help us in, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” replied Dickenson.
“Oh, we shall keep them off. They’ll begin sniping as soon as they get a chance, but they’ll never make a big attack in the open field like we’re going over now.”
A very little while after they overtook the party hanging back till they came up, Captain Edwards being with the men, ready to congratulate them on the admirable way in which their task had been carried out.
The brisk walking over the veldt in the clear, bright air rapidly dissipated Dickenson’s unpleasant sensations, and when the main body was overtaken the young officer would have felt quite himself again if it had not been for the dull, heavy sense of misery which asserted itself: for constantly now came the ever-increasing belief that he must accept the worst about his comrade, something in his depressed state seeming to repeat to him the terrible truth—that poor Drew Lennox must be dead.
He found himself at last side by side with the major, who as they went on began to question him about his friend’s disappearance, and he frowned when Dickenson gravely told him his fears.
“No, no,” said the major; “we must hope for better things than that. He’ll turn up again, Dickenson. We must not have our successful raid discounted by such a misfortune.—Eh, what’s that?”