"'Ware big gun!" called the sentries. "West quarter, 'ware!"
The Mother-Superior grew pale, for the Women's Laager, towards which the little Boer mare was steadily trotting with the laden spider, lay in the menaced quarter, with a bare stretch of veld between it and the Camp of the Irregular Horse, whose white tents and dug-out shelters were pleasantly shaded by ancient blue gums, picturesque and stately in spite of broken boughs and foliage torn by shrapnel and seared by the chemical fumes of bursting charges innumerable.
"Will you not go down?" Saxham asked her.
She shook her head in reply, and stood with a waiting face in prayerful silence, not stirring save to make the Sign of the Cross. And as the long white fingers fluttered over the bosom of the black habit, the faint cry that Saxham's quick ear had heard before floated up from the populous depths below.
"What is that?"
Before the question had left Saxham's lips, the monster gun spoke out in deafening thunder from the enemy's position at East Point, nearly two miles away. The heavy grey smoke-pillar of the driving-charge towered against the sunbright distance, and simultaneously with the crack of the discharge, sounding as though all the pent-up forces of Hell had burst the brazen gates of Terror, and rushed forth to annihilate and destroy, the ninety-four pound projectile passed overhead, sweeping half the corrugated-iron roof from the railway-official's late dwelling with a fiendish clatter and din, as it passed harmlessly over the Women's Laager, and, wrecking a sentry's shelter on the western line of defences, burst harmlessly upon the veld beyond, blotting out the low hills behind a curtain of acrid green vapour.
"Get under cover, quick!" Saxham had shouted to his companion, as deafened by the tremendous concussion, and dazed and half-asphyxiated by the poisonous fumes, he strove for mastery with his maddened horse. This regained, he looked for the figure in the black habit and white coif, and knew a shock of horror in seeing it prone upon the ground.
"No, no, I am not hurt!" she cried, lightly rising as he hurried towards her. The tremendous air-concussion had thrown her down, and beyond a scratch upon her hand and some red dust on the black garments she was in nothing the worse.
"I don't know how I kept my own legs," Saxham said, laughing.
"It went by like twenty avalanches," she agreed. "And blessed be our Lord, excepting for the damage to the roof, no more seems to have been done. I can see the spider stopping near the Women's Laager." She peered out earnestly over the shimmering waste of dusty yellow-brown, and cried out joyfully: "Ah, Sister Hilda Antony and Sister Ruperta are getting out. All is well with them; all is well."