f 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 wh