Lee-Metford carbines that
lean in an angle made by the house-wall and the verandah end. Also, but
for the tension of long-sustained watchfulness on both faces, making it
plain that, though resting and reposeful, they are neither of them
unexpectant of a summons to be the opposite of these things. It is a look
that, at different degrees of intensity, is stamped on every face in
Gueldersdorp. And the same uncertainty possesses and pervades even
unsentient things. The Union Jack, hanging listlessly from the summit of
its lofty staff, bathed in the golden, glowing atmosphere of this January
day, may, in an instant's space, give place to the red signal of danger;
the bugle, now silent, may at any moment blare out its loud and dismal
note of warning; the bells that call with peaceful insistence, "Come to
church! come to church!" in the twinkling of an eye may be clanging scared
townsfolk to their burrowed hiding-places. You never know. For General
Brounckers, though a God-fearing man, sometimes goes in for Sunday
gun-practice, quite unintentionally, as he afterwards explains. Hence,
even on the Sabbath, it is as well to be prepared.

Beauvayse is the first to break the drowsy silence by knocking the
lengthened ash off his cigar, and expressing his opinion that the weed
might be a worse one.

"Considerin' the price the box of fifty was knocked down to me for at
Kreils' auction yesterday," states Captain Bingo, "it's simply smokin'
gold. Nine pound fifteen-and-six runs me into, how much apiece?" He yawns
cavernously, and gives the calculation up. "Always was a duffer at
figures," he says, and relapses into silence until, in the act of throwing
the nearly smoked-out cigar-butt away, he pulls himself up, and,
economically impaling it on his penknife-blade, secures a few more whiffs.

"Against the Lenten days to come, when there will be no balm left in
Gilead," says Beauvayse, cocking a grey-green eye at him in sleepy
derision, "and no tobacco in Gueldersdorp."

"Kreils' are sellin' dashed bad cigarettes at a pound the box of a hundred
now," says Captain Bingo; "and I've a notion of layin' in a stock of 'em.
We smoked tea in the Sudan, and I had a shot at hemp, but it plays the
very devil with the nerves. All jumps and twitches, you know, after a pipe
or two. Nervous as a cat, or a woman. And, talking of women, I wonder
where my wife is?"

He turns a large, pink, disconsolate face upon Beauvayse. Beauvayse
responds with the