“But, poor follows!” he said, “this will be the second night they have been out on the veldt, and it will help to keep them awake.”
Lennox was at the end of a couple of hours sleeping as heavily as ever. Dickenson had seated himself close by him so that he could lay a hand upon his forehead from time to time; and he judged that the poor fellow must be in pain, for each time there was a sharp wincing, accompanied by a deep sigh, which resulted in the touch being laid on more lightly. It was only to satisfy himself in the darkness that his comrade was sleeping and not sinking into some horrible state of lethargy; and finding at last that there was no apparent need for his anxiety, the watcher directed his attention to listening for sounds out upon the veldt, and divided the time by making surmises as to the experiences through which Lennox must have passed.
Captured and escaped! That was the conclusion to which he always came, and he wished that Lennox would wake up and enliven the tedium of the dark watch by relating all that he had gone through.
The lion made itself heard again and again, but at greater distances; and the prowling jackals and hyenas seemed to follow, for their cries grew fainter and fainter and then died out into the solemn silence of the veldt, which somehow appeared to the listener as if it were connected with an intense feeling of cold.
Then all at once, as Dickenson turned himself wearily and in pain from the crushing he had received when the stone slipped, he became conscious of something dark close by, and his hand went involuntarily to his revolver.
The next minute he realised that what he saw was not darker, but the sky behind it lighter, and he sprang to his feet.
“You, sergeant?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” was whispered back. “Be careful; one never knows who may be near. The light’s coming fast.”
Coming so fast that at the end of a quarter of an hour Dickenson could dimly make out the steep kopje by Groenfontein away to his left, and the low, hill-like laager that they had destroyed twenty-four hours before low down on the opposite horizon.
“Why, sergeant,” he whispered eagerly, “if we had started again in the dark we should have gone right off to where the Boers might have been.”