Ernest watched him as he galloped off, and a thought struck him.
“Alston,” he said, “do you think that it is wise to bring that boy into this business?”
His friend slewed himself round sharply in the saddle.
“Why not?” he asked, in his deliberate way.
“Well, you know there is a risk.”
“And why should not the boy run risks as well as the rest of us? Look here, Ernest, when I first met you there in Guernsey I was going to see the place where my wife was brought up. Do you know how she died?”
“I have heard she died a violent death; I do not know how.”
“Then I will tell you, though it costs me something to speak of it. She died by a Zulu assegai, a week after the boy was born. She saved his life by hiding him under a heap of straw. Don’t ask me particulars; I can’t bear to talk of it. Perhaps now you understand why I am commanding a corps enrolled to serve against the Zulus. Perhaps, too, you will understand why the lad is with me. We go to avenge my wife and his mother, or to fall in the attempt. I have waited long for the opportunity; it has come.”
Ernest relapsed into silence, and presently fell back to his troop.
On the 20th of January, Alston’s Horse, having moved down by easy marches from Pretoria, camped at Rorke’s Drift, on the Bulialo River, not far from a store and a thatched building used as a hospital, which were destined to become historical. Here orders reached them to march on the following day and join No. 3 column, with which was Lord Chelmsford himself, and which was camped about nine miles from the Bulialo River, at a spot called Isandhlwana, or the “Place of the Little Hand.” Next day, the 21st of January, the corps moved on accordingly, and following the waggon-track that runs past the Inhlazatye Mountain, by midday came up to the camp, where about twenty-five hundred men of all arms were assembled under the immediate command of Colonel Glynn. Their camp, which was about eight hundred yards square, was pitched facing a wide plain, with its back towards a precipitous, slab-sided hill, of the curious formation sometimes to be seen in South Africa. This was Isandhlwana.