“Next?” cried Lennox. “You must cover us with three parts of the men while with the rest I try to get the gun right up to the kopje.”
It was no easy task, for the driver and foreloper of the team had fled with the artillerymen and the rest of the Boers, while the pricked oxen were disposed to be unmanageable. But British soldiers are accustomed to struggle with difficulties of all kinds in war, and by the time the Boers had recovered somewhat from their surprise, and, urged by their leaders, were advancing again to try and recover the lost piece, the team of oxen were once more working together, and the ponderous gun was being slowly dragged onward towards the rocky eminence.
It was terribly hard work in the darkness; for the way, after about a hundred yards or so over level veldt, began to ascend, and blocks of granite seemed to be constantly rising from the ground to impede the progress of the oxen.
In spite of all, though, the gun and its limber were dragged on and on, while in the distance a line of tiny jets of fire kept on spurting out, showing that the enemy had recovered from the panic and were coming on, firing as they came, the bullets whizzing over the heads of our men, but doing no harm.
“Steady! steady! and as quietly as you can,” said Lennox in warning tones, as he kept on directing and encouraging his men. “They are firing by guesswork.—Ah! that won’t do any good,” he muttered, for just as he was speaking Dickenson and his men, who had spread out widely, began to reply; “it will only show our weakness.”
He looked forward again in the direction the oxen were being driven; but the kopje was invisible, and now he altered his opinion about the firing of Dickenson’s detachment, for he felt that it would let the captain know what was going on, and bring up support.
He was quite right, for in a very little time Captain Roby had felt his way to them, learnt the cause of the firing, and carefully covered the retreat till the intricacies of the rocky ascent put a stop to further progress in the gloom, and a halt was called till morning.
The rest of the night passed in the midst of a terrible suspense, for though the Boer firing gradually died out, as if the leaders had at last awakened to the fact of its being a mere waste of ammunition, the British detachment, scattered here and there about the captured gun, lay in momentary expectation of the enemy creeping up and then making a rush.
“But they will not,” said Lennox quietly. “They’ll wait till morning, and creep up from stone to stone and bush to bush, trying to pick us off.”
“You need not be so cock-sure about it,” growled Dickenson. “They are in force, and must have known from our fire how few we were. A rush would do it.”