They were eloquent enough, even in their speechlessness, those three dead troopers, whose boots and coats were missing, and whose pockets had been turned inside out. Not a man of them was known to any member of the beleaguered garrison. Yet every man and woman there was the poorer by three friends and one more hope.
We know what was happening while Gueldersdorp ate her patient heart out. It has been written in the History of Successful Strategy how Lord Williams of Afghanistan, landing at Cape Town in January, found Muller on his way from Port Christmas, Whittaker at Bergstorm, Parris at Kooisberg, Ruthven on the Brodder, and everybody and everything at a deadlock. And being too old and wise to disdain the wisdom of others, the keen old brain under the frosty thatch recalled to mind the story of Stonewall Jackson, collected what forces he could muster, slipped in between two of the columns held immovable, and having established his lines of communication to the south, launched himself on Groenfontein, and created the necessary diversion. A mighty wave rolled back to protect the menaced Free State capital, the paralysed columns moved again, Diamond Town was relieved by Sir George Parris, and Commandant Selig Brounckers was captured at Pijlberg.
Doubtless he was a bully and a tyrant, that roaring-voiced, truculent man. But those angry, red-veined grey eyes of his could look Death squarely in the face, and the brain behind them could conceive and plan stratagems and tactics that were masterly, and devise works that were marvels of Defensive Art. And the heavy hand that patted Mevrouw Brounckers' head, as that devoted woman sat disconsolate in the river-bed, surrounded by her children, and pots, and bundles, and the roaring voice that softened to speak words of consolation, even as the trap so ingeniously set to catch a Tartar closed in—North, South, East, West—belonged to a man who knew not only how to fight and win and how to fight and lose, but how to love and pity.
There came the faint dawn of a day in May when the plan of that bright young man Schenk Eybel was tried, and tried successfully.... The line between two forts that lay far apart on the south and south-west was pierced, while the incessant roll of rifles made a mile-long fringe of jagged yellowish flame along the enemy's eastern trenches. Even before the feint sputtered out the rush had been made, the stratagem had developed, and at the bidding of twenty incendiary torches, the daub-and-wattle huts of the Barala town leaped skyward in one roaring conflagration.
We know the glorious, unlooked-for ending of that day of fire and blood. It is marked with a white stone in the History of the Siege of Gueldersdorp, and the chapter is headed "The Turning of the Tables." It gives a spirited description of the prudent retreat of General Huysmans, the unconditional surrender of Commandant Eybel, and winds up with a pen-and-ink sketch of Brounckers' bright boy breaking the chaff-bread of captivity in the quarters of that slim duyvel, the Engelsch Commandant.
But while the Boer was yet top-dog in the scuffle, and held the Barala stad, and the fort that had lately done duty as headquarters for the Irregulars, holding captive their commanding officer, several of his juniors, and some fifteen troopers, with a handful of Town Guards; and all the fighting men who could be spared from the trenches were being posted between the menacing danger and the town, and a couple of field-guns were being hurried into position, and it had not yet occurred to Commandant Schenk Eybel that the cautious Huysmans might leave him in the lurch, things looked very bad indeed for the doughty defenders of little Gueldersdorp—certainly up to afternoon-tea time, when a couple of Scotch girls crossed the two hundred yards of veld that lay between the Fort and the town, carrying cans of steaming tea for the parching Britons penned up there.
You are to see those calm, unconscious heroines start, fixing their hairpinned braids with quick, deft touches, pinning up their skirts as for the crossing of a wimpling burn rather than for the fording of Death's black river. They measured the distance with cool, keen eyes, took up a can in each hand, exchanged a word, and started. The remaining can they left behind, saying they would come back for it. And they meant to, and would have, but for a pale young woman in curling-pins, crowned by the deplorable wreck of a large and flowery hat, and wearing a pink cotton gown of deplorable limpness, through the washed-out material of which her sharpened collar-bones and thin shoulders threatened to pierce. For 'ow are you to take to call a proper pride in yourself when you 'aven't got no 'art for anythink any more?
You are to understand that Emigration Jane 'ad bin 'in 'Orspital along of what the doctors called the Triphoid Fever, months an' months; and 'ad bin orful bad, an' sent back again after being discharged, on accounts of an Elapse, and kep' a dreadful time at the Women's Combalescent, through her blood being nothink but water—and now you may guess the reason of that fruitless search on the part of W. Keyse.
She tried to run at first, but the can was full and heavy, and her knees shook under her at the screaming of the bullets over that cross-swept field. Her pore 'art beat somethink crooil, and there was a horrible kind of swishing in her years, but to give up, and chuck away the can, and scuttle back to cover, with Them Two stepping along in front as cool—and more than halfway over, was what Emigration Jane could not demean herself to do. And at last they passed her coming back, and the Fort loomed up before her, as suddenly as though it had sprouted up mushroom-fashion under her dazzled eyes. And grimy men were leaning over the sandbag-parapet applauding her, and blackened hands attached to hairy arms reached down and grabbed the can, and it was taken up into the air and vanished, she never knew how. And then she was staring up into the lean, brickdust-coloured face of a Corporal of the Town Guard, whose head was swathed in a bloody bandage, and in all the world there was only Her and Him.
"You fust-class little Nailer. You A1 bit o' frock——" W. Keyse began. Then his pale eyes bolted and his jaw fell, and his overwhelming joy and relief took on the aspect of horrified consternation.