"Rifle-fire! Out on the veld over yonder." McFadyen's towel waved North. "Do ye hear it?"
"Ay, do I! First bluid has been drawn. And to which side?"
Boom!...
The Hospital quivered to its foundations at the tremendous detonation. Shattered glass fell in showers of fragments from the roof of the operating-theatre, as the force of the explosion passed beneath the buildings in a surging of the ground on which they stood, a slow wave rolling southwards, without a backward draw.
The lavatory door had jammed, as doors will jam in earthquakes. Saxham tore it open, and the three shirt-sleeved, ensanguined men ran through the theatre, strewn with the débris from the roof, and through the double glazed doors communicating with the passage, populous with patients who should have been in bed, pursued by nurses as pale and shaken as their stampeding charges. The rear of the Hospital faces North, and they ran down a corridor full of dust, ending in more glazed doors, and tore out upon the back stoep, wide and roomy, and full of deck chairs and wicker lounges.
"Do ye see it? Ten thousand salted South African deevils! Do ye no' see it?" the Surgeon-Major yelled, pointing to a monstrous milk-white soap-bubble-shaped cloud that slowly rose up in the hot blue sky to the North and hung there, sullenly brooding.
"What is it, Major?" shouted Saxham, for behind them the Hospital was full of clamour. Nurses and dressers were running out into the grounds to listen and question and conjecture, the barely reclaimed veld beyond the palings was black with hurrying, shouting men, bandoliered, and carrying guns of every kind and calibre, from the venerable gaspipe of the native and the aged but still useful Martini-Henry of the citizen, to the Lee-Metford repeating-carbine, and the German magazine rifle of latest delivery to the troops of Imperial Majesty at Berlin. Men were clustered like bees on the flat tin roofs of the sheds at the Railway Works; men had climbed the signal-posts and were looking out from them over the sea of veld; the Volunteers garrisoning the Cemetery had poured from their temporary huts and dug-out shelters, and were massed on the top of their sand-bag mounds. A fair, handsome Staff officer, the younger of the two men who had accompanied the Colonel, went by at a tearing gallop, mounted on a fine grey charger, and followed by an orderly, while the pot-hat and truncheon of a scared native constable emerged timidly from the gaping jaws of a rusty water-cistern, long dismissed from Hospital use, and exiled to the open with other rubbish waiting transference to the scrap-heap; and far out upon the railway-line that vanished in the yellowing sea of veld an unseen engine screeched and screeched....
The Chief, in his pet post of vantage upon the roof of Nixey's Hotel, lowered his binoculars as the persistent whistle kept open. The lines about his keen eyes and mouth curved into a cheerful smile. The sound was coming nearer, and presently Engine 123 backed into view, a mile or so from waiting, expectant Gueldersdorp, and snorting, raced at full speed for her home in the railway-yard. Her driver was the young Irishman from the County Kildare, and her guard hailed from Shoreditch. And both of them had a tale to tell of what Taggart had called the Colonel's double surprise-packet, to a tall man whom they found waiting on the metals by the upper Signal Cabin.
"Six mile from the start, sorra a yard more or less, sorr! I sees a comp'ny o' thim divils mustered on the bog, I mane the veld, sorr—smokin' their pipes an' passin' the bottle, an' givin' the overlook to a gang av odthers, that was rippin' up the rails undher the directions av a head-gaffer wid a hat brim like me granny's tay-thray, an' a beard like the Prophet Moses."
"I sor 'is whoppin' big 'at myself, though we was two mile off when we picked the beggars out," the guard objected; "but 'ow could you twig 'is beard or that the other blokes was smokin'?"