s as the men cocked
their pieces; but somehow I did not feel scared, for a feeling of
desperation was upon me, and I was strung-up to dare anything to get my
liberty; and, besides, my father's orders were that I should make a
dash.

"They can't hit me," I said to myself; and wherever the track was fair
going we went on at a canter, drawing rein wherever the ground grew bad.
At these latter times the captain began talking loudly in a
highly-pitched and half-contemptuous way to the leading men; and when
his words reached my ears I made out that his subject was either about
military evolutions and a man's bearing in the saddle, or else, in a
harsh and bitter tone, about the brutal Saxon who was at last going to
receive his dues for his long years of evil-doing and tyranny towards
the oppressed. Hearing such talk, I rode on half-wondering what England
had been doing towards the Irish at home and the Boers abroad, for this
was all news to me, and I had never noticed among the Dutch settlers on
the veldt anything but a stolid kind of contentment with their
prosperous lot; there not being a single case of poverty, as far as I
knew, within a hundred miles of our pleasant home.

At the thought of home a strange swelling came in my throat, and the
wide, open veldt before me looked dim as I pictured all I had left
behind; for, happy as had been the life I led, and lovely as everything
around had always seemed, home had never seemed so beautiful as now.
However, I set my teeth hard, knit my brows, and with an effort seemed
to swallow down that swelling lump in my throat, at the same time
nipping Sandho's sides so sharply that he gathered himself up to bound
off; but he was checked by a savage snatch at the rein, and received a
blow with the barrel of my escort's rifle, as the surly and scowling
brute beside me growled out a fierce oath in Dutch.

The plunge Sandho gave nearly unseated me, and in another moment he
would have been rearing and kicking to get free; but a few gentle words
from my lips soothed the poor beast down, and he settled into his canter
once more, while I fell to wondering whether my poor horse could think
and would understand that the brutal treatment did not come from his
master.

On and on we rode over ground familiar to me, for many a long journey
from home had I been in every direction--hunting, shooting, or with our
wagon and oxen and Joeboy as foreloper, on journeys of many days through
the wildernes