here beyond the
Vaal, where the veld was swept by the lightning and the storm, the home
of wild dreams, and of a loneliness terrible and strange, to which the
man who once had tasted its awful pleasures returned and returned
again, until he was, at the last, part of its loneliness, its woeful
agitations and its reposeless quiet.

It was not possible for him to think or be like pure white people, to
do as they did. He was a child of the kopje, the spruit, and the dun
veld, where men dwelt with weird beings which were not men--presences
that whispered, telling them of things to come, blowing the warnings of
Destiny across the waste, over thousands and thousands of miles. Such
as he always became apart and lonely because of this companionship of
silence and the unseen. More and more they withdrew themselves,
unwittingly and painfully, from the understanding and companionship of
the usual matter-of-fact, commonplace, sensible people--the settler,
the emigrant, and the British man. Sinister they became, but with the
helplessness of those in whom the under-spirit of life has been
working, estranging them, even against their will, from the rest of the
world.

So Krool, estranged, lonely, even in the heart of friendly, pushing,
jostling London, still was haunted by presences which whispered to him,
not with the old clearness of bygone days, but with confused utterances
and clouded meaning; and yet sufficient in dark suggestion for him to
know that ill happenings were at hand, and that he would be in the
midst of them, an instrument of Fate. All night strange shapes trooped
past his clouded eyes, and more than once, in a half-dream, he called
out to his master to help him as he was helped long ago when that
master rescued him from death.

Long before the rest of the house was stirring, Krool wandered hither
and thither through the luxurious rooms, vainly endeavouring to occupy
himself with his master's clothes, boots, and belongings. At last he
stole into Byng's room and, stooping, laid something on the floor; then
reclaiming the two cables which Rudyard had read, crumpled up, and
thrown away, he crept stealthily from the room. His face had a sombre
and forbidding pleasure as he read by the early morning light the
discarded messages with their thunderous warnings--"To-morrow...
Prepare!"

He knew their meaning well enough. "To-morrow" was here, and it would
bring the challenge from Oom Paul to try the might of England again