, be off!"

John poured out and swallowed half a tumblerful of the brandy, and in
another moment he was outside the house and had slipped off into the
night. It was very dark and wet, for the rain-clouds had covered up the
moon, and he soon learned that any attempt to look for his horse would
end in failure and probably in his recapture. The only thing to do was
to get away on foot in the direction of Mooifontein as quickly as he
could; so off he went down the track across the veldt as fast as his
stiff legs would take him. He had a ten miles trudge before him, and
with that cheerful acquiescence in circumstances over which he had no
control which was one of his characteristics, he set to work to make the
best of it. For the first hour or so all went well, then to his intense
disgust he discovered that he was off the track, a fact at which anybody
who has ever had the pleasure of wandering along a so-called road on the
African veldt on a dark night will scarcely be surprised.

After wasting a quarter of an hour or more in a vain attempt to find the
path, John struck out boldly for a dim mass that loomed in the distance,
and which he took to be Mooifontein Hill. And so it was, only instead of
keeping to the left, where he would have arrived at the house, or rather
where the house had stood, unwittingly he bore to the right, and thus
went half round the hill before he found out his mistake. Nor would he
have discovered it then had he not chanced in the mist and darkness to
turn into the mouth of the great gorge known as Leeuwen Kloof, where
once, months ago, he had had an interesting talk with Jess just before
she went to Pretoria. It was whilst he was blundering and stumbling up
this gorge that at length the rain ceased and the moon revealed herself,
it being then nearly midnight. Her very first rays lit upon one of the
extraordinary pillars of balanced boulders, and by it he recognised the
locality. As may be imagined, strong man though he was, by this time
John was quite exhausted. For nearly a week he had been travelling
incessantly, and for the last two nights he had not only not slept, but
also had endured much mental excitement and bodily peril. Were it not
for the brandy that Tanta Coetzee gave him he could never have tramped
the fifteen miles or so of ground which he had covered. Now he was quite
broken down, and felt that the only thing which he could do, wet through
as he was, would be to lie down somewhere, an