“Dessay it will, sir, before long.”
“How does Mr Lennox seem?”
“Head’s resting on my clasped hands, sir, and he’s sleeping like a baby—regular fagged out.”
It was a slow and toilsome march; but the party were in the highest of spirits, and, in the hope of seeing the lights at Groenfontein at the end of an hour or so, they kept on, only pausing now and again to listen for danger and to rearrange Lennox, whose silence began to alarm his friend. But the sergeant assured him that the poor fellow was sleeping heavily, and they went on again with a dark mental cloud coming over Dickenson’s exhilaration as he thought of the unpleasant news that awaited his friend.
“But a word from him will set that right,” he said to himself. “Poor fellow! He must be done up to sleep like that. Why, he never even asked how we got on after the fight.”
Chapter Twenty Nine.
In Difficulties.
On and on at the ponies’ slow walk through the short scrub or over the bare plain, with the clever little animals seeming to instinctively avoid every stone that was invisible to the riders in the intense darkness. Every now and then a halt was made, one of which their steeds immediately took advantage by beginning to browse on such tender shoots as took their fancy, and again and again the whispered questions were asked: