From Bloemfontein to Kimberley is, as we have said, a distance of a hundred miles. It is best understood by a Londoner by suggesting the comparison that he should be compelled to ride to Hereford every time he wished to despatch a telegram.
Out from the isolated city the messengers went, making their way in the darkness or in the dawn over the red slushing tracks that had suffered the steady downpour of the night's rain, till, by whichever road they had moved out of Bloemfontein, they met at the battle-ground of Driefontein.
From that point onwards the struggle became keen, and the breakdown of a horse meant a delay that might perhaps be reckoned in days rather than hours. The public that glances casually at the telegrams of their morning papers does not often realise the importance of a few minutes to the correspondents whose work they are reading. In this case, besides the ordinary delay, the lonely riders that were making way across the veldt had to spur them on the risk of finding the Field Telegraph repaired before they could reach the Diamond City, and the cable blocked with messages sent over their heads from Bloemfontein.
Early in the great race the Times rider met with disaster. The horse he rode fell, and, though the injury seemed slight enough at the time, never properly recovered itself, causing a delay of some hours before the next relay could be reached.
But the Daily Mail was still more unlucky. Starting last of all, the well-known light-weight who carried the fortunes of the "largest circulation of this earth" made his way forward through the fading light of Wednesday, gaining rapidly on his predecessors, and, confident in the excellent provision made for him, was getting out of his mount the last pound of pace, when a cut corner flung him against a barbed wire fence, which so terribly lacerated his leg that further riding was out of the question.
Binding up his scratches as best he might, he found himself compelled to walk back thirty-five miles to Bloemfontein, unable to ride, and at the journey's end almost unable to stand.
So the Times and Reuter—each armed with a duplicate despatch from the Commander-in-Chief—were left to compete for the contingent advantage of getting first into Kimberley.
And now was done a notable achievement. Browning, in his poem, "How we brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," has chosen, by an odd accident, exactly the distance which divides Kimberley from Bloemfontein; but we can rest assured that the "good news" of the capture of the Boer capital sped on as fast as ever went the news across the flat plains of Flanders.
Over the grey sage-brush of the veldt, over the high, dry grass, under the rare shade of poplar trees, where the horse was watered, along the red crumbling road or the mere beaten wheel track where a thousand waggons and twenty thousand animals had worn a temporary track, the hurrying hoof of the courier's mount lessened the long distance between the capital of the O.F.S. and the end of that wire of which the other lies in the capital of the world.
In the afternoon of Wednesday three bullets whistled past the rider of the Agency, and the newspaper's courier had a similar experience at the same spot as he passed a little later.