The red-brown veldt stretched away to the sky-line, sixty miles distant.Level as it looked, it was nevertheless a succession of softly rolling ridges dotted with clumps of dried sagebrush and spotted here and there with heaps of black volcanic rocks.Far to the northward, a thin line of poplars and willows marked the bed of a river.Beyond that, again, the air was thick with smoke from acres of burning veldt.The days were full of dust, and the nights were full of frost; it was the month of June, and winter was upon the land.
The camp was taking a well-earned rest.For days, the men had swept over the veldt, following hard on the trail of a Boer general who only made himself visible now and then by a spatter of bullets, when his convoy train was delayed at a difficult ford.It had been a week of playing pussin-the-corner over a charred and dusty land, where the only roads were trails trodden out to powder by the hoofs of those that had gone before.Both men and mounts were wellnigh exhausted, and the officers had decreed a halt.
The strain had been intense.Now, with the relaxing of it, its memory vanished, and the halt swiftly took upon itself the appearance of a school holiday.Laughing and chaffing each other, groups of men loitered here and lounged there, smoking, writing letters, and taking stout, unlovely stitches in their time-worn khaki clothing.At one side of the camp was the tent of the mess sergeant, equipped like a portable species of corner grocery.Near by, Paddy apparently was in his element, presiding over his camp-kitchen, a vast bonfire encircled with a dozen iron pots.At the farther edge of the camp Weldon was umpiring a game of football between his own squadron and a company of the Derbys.Owing to the athletic zeal of the hour, it was big-side, and Weldon was too busy in keeping his eye upon so many players to pay much attention to his own loneliness.
In all truth, however, he was lonely.The week since he had rejoined his squadron had dragged perceptibly.Captain Frazer was in Cape Town; Carew was still in hospital at Johannesburg where, under the eyes of Alice Mellen and her cousin, he was fast resuming his old finical habits.Dingy and veldt-stained though he might be, Carew at heart would always remain the exquisite.However, exquisite that he was bound to be, he was even more the soldier, and his gay eyes had clouded, as he had wrung Weldon's hand in parting.
"Lucky dog!" he said enviously."I am off duty for two weeks more, and you are going back to the thick of things.One must take it as it comes; but I say, old man, don't forget me when the bullets begin to pelt at you again."And Weldon had been better than his promise.He had thought of Carew, day and night, for the entire week, thought of him and missed him acutely.Carew was an ideal comrade in that he never, under any circumstances, took himself in earnest.
A leg which will carry a man on horseback is by no means fit for football.Weldon, finished player that he was, found it tame work to umpire a team whose sole idea of tactics was to get there in any way that offered itself.Half an hour sufficed; then, appointing an understudy, he walked away in search of Paddy.From the midst of a torrent of instructions to his quartette of black subordinates, Paddy's voice sang out a cheery greeting.
"Come along, little feller! Come and get something to eat.It's hungry you ought to be, the day, after the way you've been walking all over the country on horseback and an empty stomach.Try this, as a sample of your dinner, and sit down by the edge of the fire, whilst, and tell me how it tastes."The iron spoon scraped lustily over the iron dixey.Then Weldon returned them both with a low bow.
"Like yourself, Paddy, short and sweet."
Paddy brandished the spoon, weapon-wise.
"Short is it, you little Canuck! So is a pepperpot short; but it holds a hell of a flavor.Leave Paddy a gun in his hand, and his short legs will keep up with your long ones, when it's the firing line that's before him.""The old sing-song, Paddy.Give us something new.""So will I, when I get my wishing.Till then, you'll hear it over and over again.A man of my temper, little one, will never rest content at a firing line that's all surrounded about with ten-quart pots of boiling beef.""Why don't you resign, then?"
"Resigned! How can I be resigned? I'm a chunk of dynamite in a suet-pot, hard to manage and ready to go off at any time that something strikes me.Meantime, I am like what they say is dirt: matter out of place.""Then why don't you get out?" Weldon queried.
"I am out of place now, I'm telling you," Paddy returned, as he pensively rested his cheek upon the bowl of the spoon in his hand.
"Yes; but why not refuse to stay here as cook?"Sorrowfully Paddy shook his head, spoon and all.
"That's what I did do, little one."
"And what happened?"
"This." The spoon came into evidence once more."They blarneyed me up and they blarneyed me down, and they said nobody could cook like Paddy.Anybody could shoot a baker's dozen of Boers; but only one man in the camp could fill up the boys to give them a fit and level stomach for the battle.And here I am, and here I'm like to be, till the new moon in the heavens turns to a curly strip of bully beef.If I'd known the Captain was about to escape to Cape Town, it's Paddy that would have escaped with him, hanging on to the tail of his coat.Saint Patrick's vipers! What's that?"A hum, a spat, and a little spurt of red dust rolled lazily upward.
Then another hum followed.There was a scurry of men, a squeak of leather, the light clashing of rifles snatched from the stack; and the troops were off.
