in position, Mausers were popping from below,
disclosing the kraals and outhouses of the farm.

"We must stop up here till daybreak. They will be gone before that.
Well, there will be no surprise of Hertzog at Houwater to-day, all
through a turn of rank bad luck!" and the Rimington captain commenced
to fill his pipe, for his long abstinence from tobacco-smoke by reason
of the night-march had been his particular grievance since the column
had left Britstown.

FOOTNOTES:

[23] Hertzog.

VI.

A POOR SCENT.

"There will be no surprise of Hertzog at Houwater to-day."

The Rimington captain had summed up the results consequent upon the
night-attack with considerable accuracy, and as his party, in
obedience to orders, worked down the banks of the Ongers River
covering the right of the combined advance upon Houwater, there was
abundance of evidence to show that Hertzog and Company had little
intention of becoming enmeshed by the ponderous strategy set in motion
against them. Nor was the weather favourable. The storm which had
preceded the night-attack was one of those lowly pitched
thunder-clouds which, caught in a craterlike valley enclosed by
kopjes, revolved in a circle until it had spent itself. It took some
hours of morning sun before it was finally dissolved. Consequently
when the advance-guard of the force which was formed by the New
Cavalry Brigade topped the great sloping glacis, inclining for all the
world like an under-feature of the Sussex Downs, into the stagnant
morass which is Houwater's most prominent feature, the last Boers were
disappearing into the labyrinth of Minie Kloof beyond. But there was
just sufficient excitement to take the cold and stiffness, bred of a
miserable march, out of the bones of the men. The pom-pom unlimbered
above the drift, and spent, at an impossible range, a belt of its tiny
bombs. A spare dozen of Rimingtons, who had pushed farther forward
than the rest, lightened their bandoliers by a few cartridges, and
then, unmolested, the miniature British army marched into possession
of its _point d'appui_.

You who have only seen the British soldier at his worst, that is, when
he is buttoned into a tunic little removed in design from a
strait-waistcoat, or when the freedom of the man has been subordinated
to the lick-and-spittle polish of the dummy,--you who glory in
tin-casing for your Horse Guards, and would hoot the Guardsman bold
enough to affect a woollen muffler,--