He is drenched to the skin, it goes without saying, in a minute or two. So is the Railway Volunteer, who challenges him at the bridge that carries the single-gauge railway southward over the Olopo, in spite of his ragged waterproof and an additional piece of tarpaulin. So is a mounted officer of the Staff, in whom Saxham mechanically recognises Captain Bingo Wrynche, as he goes by at a furious gallop, spurring, and jagging savagely at the mouth of the handsome if attenuated brown charger, who sends stones and mud and water flying from his furious iron-shod hoofs. So is the Barala on guard by the wattled palisade of the native village—a muddy-legged and goose-fleshy warrior, in a plumed, brimless bowler and leopard-skin kaross, whose teeth can be heard chattering as he stands to attention and brings his gaspipe rifle to the slope. The Chinamen working in the patches of market-garden, where the scant supply of vegetables that command such famine-prices are raised, are certainly sheltered from the wet by their colossal umbrella-hats, but the splashed-up red gruel has imbrued them to the eyes. Yet they continue to labour cheerfully, hoeing scattered shell-fragments out of their potato-drills and removing incrusted masses of bullets that incommode the young kidney-beans, and arranging this ironmongery and metal-ware in tidy piles, possibly with a view to future commerce. And so, with another challenge from a picket, posted between the Barala village and the south trenches, where many of the loyal natives are doing duty, Saxham finds himself on the perilous tongue of land that lies behind Maxim Kopje South, and where the Staff Bombproof is situated.
As the long, low mound comes into view, a dazzling white flash leaps from a fold of the misty grey hills beyond, and one of Meisje's great shells goes screaming and winnowing westwards. Then a sentry of the Irregulars, a battered, shaggy, berry-brown trooper, standing knee-deep in a hole, burrowed in the lee of a segment of stone-dyke that is his shelter, challenges for the last time.
"'Alt! I know you well enough, Doctor." It is a man whose wounded arm was dressed, one blazing day last January, outside the Convent bombproof. "But you'll 'ave to give the countersign. Pass Honour and all's well. But"—the sentry's nostrils twitch as the savour of Saxham's pipe reaches them, and his whisper of appeal is as piercing as a yell—"if you left a pipeful be'ind you, it wouldn't do no 'arm. Don't pull your pouch out, sir; the lookout officer 'as 'is eye on you. Open it by the feel, an' drop a pinch by the stone near your toe. I'll get it when they relieve me."
Saxham complies, leaving the sentry to gloat distantly over the little brown lump of loose tangled fibres rapidly reducing to sponginess under the downpour from the skies. The long mound of raw red earth, crusted with greenish-yellow streaks of lyddite from the bursting-charges, rises now immediately before him. At its eastern end is a flagstaff displaying the Union Jack. Under the roof of the little penthouse from which the flagstaff rises are sheltered the vari-coloured acetylene lamps that are used for signalling at night.
Midway of the raw mound rises the rear elevation of an officer in dripping waterproofs, who is looking steadily through a telescope out between the long driving lances of the rain, beyond Maxim Kopje South to those mysterious hills, swathed in grey-black folds of storm-cloud, that look so desolate, and whose folds are yet as full of swarming, active, malignant life as the blanket of an unwashed Kaffir. An N.C.O. is posted a little below the officer, whose narrow shoulders and dark hair, showing above the edge of the turned-up collar and below the brim of the Field-Service cap, prove him to be not Beauvayse. And the usual blizzard of rifle-fire, varied by brisk bursts of cannonading, goes on, and the Red Scythe of the Destroyer sweeps over these two figures and about them in the customary way. But even women and children have grown indifferent to these things, and the men have long ceased to be aware of them.
A bullet sings past Saxham's ear, as the acrid exhalations of a stable rise gratefully to his nostrils, recently saluted by the fierce and clamorous smells of the native village. The ground slopes under his feet. He goes down the inclined way that ends in the horses' quarters, and the orderly, who is sitting on an empty ammunition-box outside the tarpaulin that screens off the interior of the officer's shelter, stiffens to the salute, receives a brief message, and disappears within.
Before Saxham rise the bony brown and bay and chestnut hindquarters of half a dozen lean horses, that are drowsing or fidgeting before their emptied mangers. Against the division of a loose-box that holds a fine brown charger, still saddled and steaming, and heavily splashed with mud, there leans a stretcher, which, by the ominous red stains and splashes upon it, has been recently in use.
Upon Saxham's left hand is the shelter for the rank and file. Here several gaunt, hollow-eyed, and hairy troopers are sitting on rough benches at a trestle-table, playing dominoes and draughts, or poring over tattered books by the light of the flickering oil-lamps, with tin reflectors, that hang against the earth walls. None of them are smoking, though several are sucking vigorously at empty pipes; and the rapacious light that glares in every eye as Saxham mechanically knocks out the ashes from his smoked-out briar-root against the side-post of the entrance is sufficient witness to the pangs that they endure.
Perhaps it is characteristic of the Doctor that, with a hell of revengeful fury seething in his heart, and a legion of devils unloosed and shrieking, prompting him to murder, he should have paused to relieve the tobacco-famine of the sentry, and be moved to a further sacrifice of his sole luxury by the sight of those empty pipes. The old rubber pouch, pitched by a cricketer's hand, flies in among the domino-players, and rebounds from a pondering head, as the orderly comes back, and lifts one corner of the tarpaulin for the Doctor to pass in. A pack of ravening wolves tussling over an unusually small baby might distantly reproduce the scene Saxham leaves behind him. The trestle-table and benches are upset, and men and benches, draughts and dominoes, welter in horrible confusion over the earthen floor, when the scandalised orderly-corporal rushes in to quell the riot, and thenceforward joins the rioters.
They fight like wolves, but the man who rises up from among the rest, clutching the prize, and grinning a three-cornered grin because his upper lip is split, divides the tobacco fairly to the last thread. They even share out the indiarubber pouch, and chew the pieces as long as the flavour lasts. When the thick, fragrant smoke curls up from the lighted pipes, it steals round the edges of the tarpaulin that has dropped behind Saxham, passing in to the wreaking of vengeance upon the thief whose profane and covetous hand has plucked the white lily of the Convent garden.