night was becoming very still. It was a quarter to twelve now. His back
ached, and he would have liked to lie down; but he dared not, for fear he
should drop asleep. He leaned forward with his hands between his crossed
knees, and watched the blaze he had made.

Then, after a while, Peter Halket's thoughts became less clear: they
became at last, rather, a chain of disconnected pictures, painting
themselves in irrelevant order on his brain, than a line of connected
ideas. Now, as he looked into the crackling blaze, it seemed to be one of
the fires they had make to burn the natives' grain by, and they were
throwing in all they could not carry away: then, he seemed to see his
mother's fat ducks waddling down the little path with the green grass on
each side. Then, he seemed to see his huts where he lived with the
prospectors, and the native women who used to live with him; and he
wondered where the women were. Then--he saw the skull of an old Mashona
blown off at the top, the hands still moving. He heard the loud cry of the
native women and children as they turned the maxims on to the kraal; and
then he heard the dynamite explode that blew up a cave. Then again he was
working a maxim gun, but it seemed to him it was more like the reaping
machine he used to work in England, and that what was going down before it
was not yellow corn, but black men's heads; and he thought when he looked
back they lay behind him in rows, like the corn in sheaves.

The logs sent up a flame clear and high, and, where they split, showed a
burning core inside: the cracking and spluttering sounded in his brain
like the discharge of a battery of artillery. Then he thought suddenly of
a black woman he and another man caught alone in the bush, her baby on her
back, but young and pretty. Well, they didn't shoot her!--and a black
woman wasn't white! His mother didn't understand these things; it was all
so different in England from South Africa. You couldn't be expected to do