ere within a radius of twenty
miles, and all the information that you can incidentally pick up. If
we hang about here much longer, we shall find ourselves let in for a
night-attack, and a night-attack with a Town Guard crowd like my new
addition is to be avoided."

The Intelligence officer went off to find the Tiger and get his horse
saddled up. He had reverted to his legitimate duties at once, and was
not sorry that the brigadier had detailed him for this particular
duty, though he felt that his mission had been designed rather as a
lesson to the colonel of the Mount Nelson Light Horse than as a
necessary precaution for the safety of the camp. But it took the
troop a powerful long time to turn out, and when at last twenty men
were mounted, they looked for all the world as if they were a party of
criminals about to be driven to the scaffold. The Tiger whispered to
the Intelligence officer--"We shall have to go easy with these
fellows. If we were not here, they would march out of camp with both
hands above their heads. They are the class of men who will become
panic-stricken at a dust-devil, and surrender to the first
cock-ostrich they meet!"

This may have been an exaggeration. There were some good men in the
corps, men who had fought well in the earlier days of the campaign.
But they were few and far between, and as events were to show, there
were not sufficient of the proper stamina to leaven the whole.

The farms which the brigadier had indicated were situated at the foot
of a spur of rocky excrescence which ploughed into the veldt from the
north of Minie Kloof. They were only five miles from the camp. But
that five miles proved too much for the escort. Whether it was
physical weakness or incipient mutiny it matters little. The men just
crawled along. So slow was the progress that the Intelligence officer,
afraid of being benighted, selected four of the better mounted from
the troop and pressed on to his objective, leaving the escort to
follow at such pace as they found convenient. The first farm lay in a
small kloof right against the hillside, and the approach was so masked
that the little party of scouts rode to within two hundred yards of
its whitewashed front without as they thought declaring themselves. A
rise in the ground and a hillock gave all the cover that the Tiger
deemed necessary, and he suggested that the four troopers should be
sent up a donga, which would enable them to climb the reverse of a
seco