ial-party in the morning! Look here,
Mr Intelligence, you have got to form an Intelligence Department
to-night. You had better set about it at once."

* * * * *

The Intelligence officer walked out into the clearing in front of the
station and surveyed the scene. It was now too dark to see his face;
but there was that something in his attitude that betrayed the feeling
of utter hopelessness which possessed him. It is in just such an
attitude that the schoolmaster detects Smith Major's failure to
prepare his Horace translation before that youth has hazarded a single
word. The Intelligence officer had been ordered to raise an
Intelligence Department for the brigade. Trained in the stern school
of army discipline, he had no choice but to obey. And with this end in
view he left the precincts of the station. Then the absolute
impossibility of the situation dawned upon him. Not a soul was in
sight, and even if there had been, though the powers of the press-gang
officer were vested in him, he did not know a word of the Dutch or
Kaffir tongues. He stood upon the fringe of the gaunt Karoo. On either
hand stretched a waste of lone prairie--a solitude of gathering night.
Out of its deepest shades rose masses of jet-black hill: the ragged
outline of their crests bathed purple and grey in the last effort of
the expiring twilight. Already the great dome of heaven had given
birth to a few weary stars, and but for the shrinking wake of day
still lingering in the west the great desolate pall of night had
fallen upon the veldt--the vast, mysterious, indescribable veldt!

But as treasure-trove is found when the tide is at its lowest ebb, so
often when the wall of impossibility seems an insuperable mass of
concrete, it is found to be the merest paper. As the Intelligence
officer, awed by the great solitude of the sleeping veldt, stood
musing on its fringe, a voice hailed out of the darkness--

"What ho! Whose column is that?"

A moment more and a mounted man cantered up, and a young Africander
threw himself out of the saddle.

"Whose column?" asked the new-comer.

"The New Cavalry Brigade!"

"Not Henniker's?"

"No; who are you?"

"I'm one of Rimington's Tigers.[4] I'm attached to Henniker's column,
and I've been sent down here to round up a man who lives about these
parts!"

"Have you got him?"

"No. Who may you be? Have you got a match?"

The Intelligence officer felt in his pocket,