The rounded mounds grew to spiked kopjes, heart-breaking to climb under a hot sun at four thousand feet above sea level. This is where the scouts found their spurs peculiarly useful.
Jan van Staden had thoughtfully allowed the invading force a front of two rifle-shots or four thousand yards, and they kept a thousand yards within his estimate. Ten men strung over two miles feel that they have explored all the round earth.
They saw stony slopes combing over in scrub, narrow valleys clothed with stone, low ridges of splintered stone, and tufts of brittle-stemmed bush. An irritating wind, split up by many rocky barriers, cuffed them over the ears and slapped them in the face at every turn. They came upon an abandoned camp fire, a little fresh horse-dung, and an empty ammunition-box splintered up for fire-wood, an old boot, and a stale bandage.
A few hundred yards farther along the road a battered Mauser had been thrown into a bush. The glimmer of its barrel drew the scouts from the hillside, and here the road after passing between two flat-topped kopjes entered a valley nearly half a mile wide, rose slightly, and over the nek of a ridge gave clear view across the windy plain northward.
“They’re on the dead run, for sure,” said a trooper. “Here’s their fire and their litter and their guns, and that’s where they’re bolting to.” He pointed over the ridge to the bellying dust cloud a mile long. A vulture high overhead flickered down, steadied herself, and hung motionless.
“See!” said Jan van Staden from the rocks above the road, to his waiting commando. “It turns like a well-oiled wheel. They look where they need not look, but here, where they should look on both sides, they look at our retreat—straight before them. It is tempting our people too much. I pray God no one will shoot them.”
“That’s about the size of it,” said the Captain, rubbing the dust from his binoculars. “Boers on the run. I expect they find their main line of retreat to the north is threatened. We’ll get back and tell the camp.” He wheeled his pony and his eye traversed the flat-topped kopje commanding the road. The stones at its edge seemed to be piled with less than Nature’s carelessness.
“That ’ud be a dashed ugly place if it were occupied—and that other one, too. Those rocks aren’t five hundred yards from the road, either of ’em. Hold on, sergeant, I’ll light a pipe.” He bent over the bowl, and above his lighted match squinted at the kopje. A stone, a small roundish brown boulder on the lip of another one, seemed to move very slightly. The short hairs of his neck grated his collar. “I’ll have another squint at their retreat,” he cried to the sergeant, astonished at the steadiness of his own voice. He swept the plain, and, wheeling, let the glass rest for a moment on the kopje’s top. One cranny between the rocks was pinkish, where blue sky should have shown. His men, dotted down the valley, sat heavily on their horses—it never occurred to them to dismount. He could hear the squeak of the leathers as a man shifted. An impatient gust blew through the valley and rattled the bushes. On all sides the expectant hills stood still under the pale blue.
“And we passed within a quarter of a mile of ’em! We’re done!” The thumping heart slowed down, and the Captain began to think clearly—so clearly that the thoughts seemed solid things. “It’s Pretoria gaol for us all. Perhaps that man’s only a look-out, though. We’ll have to bolt! And I led ’em into it!... You fool,” said his other self, above the beat of the blood in his eardrums. “If they could snipe you all from up there, why haven’t they begun already? Because you’re the bait for the rest of the attack. They don’t want you now. You’re to go back and bring up the others to be killed. Go back! Don’t detach a man or they’ll suspect. Go back all together. Tell the sergeant you’re going. Some of them up there will understand English. Tell it aloud! Then back you go with the news—the real news.”
“The country’s all clear, sergeant,” he shouted. “We’ll go back and tell the Colonel.” With an idiotic giggle he added, “It’s a good road for guns, don’t you think?”