"out of action" once and for all, and could not be made use of,
even when, later on, through the development of the events with which
this book deals, his services were most required by his mother and
sister.

The other two brothers, as we have said, had left Pretoria with the
first volunteers.

It is strange that the first blood shed in that terrible war should
have been that of a young Boer accidentally shot by a comrade.

As a train, laden with its burden of brave and hopeful burghers,
steamed slowly through the cutting on the south-eastern side of
Pretoria, volleys of farewell shots were fired.

It is customary to extract the bullets from the cartridges on such
occasions, but one of the burghers must have omitted to do this, with
the result that the bullet, rebounding from the rocks, penetrated a
carriage window, and seriously wounded one of the occupants.

Was this event prophetic of a later development of the war, when, as
we shall see, Boer shed the blood of brother Boer in the formation of
the National Scouts Corps?

Mrs. van Warmelo was a "voor-trekker," a pioneer, in every sense of
the word. As a girl of fourteen she had left Natal with her parents
and had "trekked," with other families, through the wild waste of
country, into the unknown and barbaric regions in which she was
destined to spend her youth.

She had watched the growth of a new country, the building up of a new
race. She had known all the hardships and dangers of life in an
unsettled and uncivilised land, had been through a number of Kaffir
wars and could speak, through personal experience, of many adventures
with savage foes and wild beasts. Her children knew her stories by
heart, and it is not to be wondered at that they grew up with the love
of adventure strong in them. And above all things, they grew up with a
strong love for the strange, rich, wild country for which their
forefathers had fought and suffered.

Mrs. van Warmelo was the eldest daughter of a family of sixteen. Her
father, Dietlof Siegfried Mare, for many years Landdrost of
Zoutpansberg, that northern territory of the Transvaal, was a direct
descendant of the Huguenot fugitives, and was a typical Frenchman,
short of stature, dark, vivacious, and exceedingly humorous, a man
remembered by all who knew him for his great hospitality and for
the shrewd, quaint humour of his sayings.

[Illustration: MRS. VAN WARMELO.]

Some years after their arrival in Zoutpansberg, Mr