"So you see, sir," he concluded, "I can now prove that I'm no thief. Raymond Fosberton stole it. I wish you'd ask Captain Hamling to show it to you, sir, and then you'd know I'm speaking the truth."
Valentine listened to this extraordinary revelation in open-eyed astonishment.
"There's no need for that," he answered—"I'll ask to see it if it's your particular wish—but, Jack, I wish you would believe that what I say is true, and that neither I nor Queen Mab ever for a moment imagined that you were the thief. You may doubt us, but we have never lost faith in you."
CHAPTER XIX.
"FOOD FOR POWDER."
"And so he lay quite still, while the shot rattled through the rushes, and gun after gun was fired over him."—The Ugly Duckling.
At last the wells were reached, and after the wants of the wounded had been supplied, Jack and his comrades got a chance of quenching their parching thirst.
Water! It was a moving sight—a crowd of men standing round a pit, at the bottom of which appeared a little puddle, which when emptied out would gradually drain in again, the spectators watching its progress with greedy eyes. Never had "Duster's" celebrated home-made ginger-beer tasted so refreshing as this muddy liquid. Jack sighed in an ecstasy of enjoyment as he gulped it down, and Joe Crouch remarked that he wished his throat was as long as a "hostridge's."
A body of three hundred men from the Guards, Heavies, and Mounted Infantry started on a return journey to the zareba to bring up the baggage, and the remainder of the force bivouacked near the wells. The night was fearfully cold; the men had nothing but the thin serge jumpers which they had worn during the heat of the day to protect them against the bitter night air. Shivering and gnawed with hunger, Jack, Joe Crouch, "Swabs," and two more men huddled together in a heap; and finding it impossible to sleep, endeavoured to stay the cravings of their empty stomachs with an occasional whiff of tobacco, those who were without pipes obtaining the loan of one from a more fortunate comrade. Jack's thoughts wandered back to Brenlands, and he smiled grimly to himself at the recollection of that first camping-out experience, and of Queen Mab's words as she promised them a supply of rugs and cushions, "Perhaps some day you won't be so well off." His mind was still full of his recent discovery. The thought that his friends must regard him as guilty of the theft, and the feeling that he could never give them proof to the contrary, had rankled in his heart more, perhaps, than he himself suspected; and now that he had at last discovered a solution to the riddle, and could prove beyond the possibility of a doubt who was the guilty party, he longed to ease his soul by talking the matter over with some one who knew the circumstances of the case. Joe Crouch was the very man.