“You’re right, sergeant; and it would have been better if I had given the order to do so at first.—Here, dismount, my lads, and hobble your cobs.—Here, I’ll help you to get Mr Lennox down, sergeant. Stop a moment; let’s try and find a patch of heath or grass or something first.—Hullo! what’s here?” he cried a minute later, after dismounting and feeling about.
“What have you found, sir?”
“Ruts—wheel-marks made, of course, by our guns or their limbers. Can’t we tell our way by those?”
“No, sir. It makes things a bit simpler; but we had a gun and wagon at each end, and we can’t tell in the dark which end this is. If we start again by this we’re just as likely to make straight off for the Boer camp as for ours.”
“Yes; we’ll wait for daylight, sergeant,” said Dickenson. “We’re all tired out, so let’s have two or three hours’ rest.”
A few minutes later Lennox, still plunged in a stupor-like sleep, was lifted from the sergeant’s pony, and at once subsided into the bed of short scrub found for him; the ponies, well hobbled, were cropping the tender parts of the bushes; and the weary party were sitting down.
There was silence for a few minutes, and then the sergeant spoke in a whisper.
“Think it would be safe for the men to light a pipe, sir?”
“Hum! Yes,” said Dickenson, “if they light the match to start their pipes under a held-out jacket and in the shelter of one of the big stones.”
He repented directly he had given the consent, on account of the risk.