sound as it passed the corners of the stones. He looked down at his gun,
which lay cocked ready on the ground at his right side; and from time to
time he raised his hand automatically and fingered the cartridges in his
belt. Then he stretched out his small wiry hands to the fire and warmed
them. It was only half past ten, and it seemed to him he had been sitting
here ten hours at the least.

After a while he threw two more large logs on the fire, and took the flask
out of his pocket. He examined it carefully by the firelight to see how
much it held: then he took a small draught, and examined it again to see
how much it had fallen; and put it back in his breast pocket.

Then Trooper Peter Halket fell to thinking.

It was not often that he thought. On patrol and sitting round camp fires
with the other men about him there was no time for it; and Peter Halket had
never been given to much thinking. He had been a careless boy at the
village school; and though, when he left, his mother paid the village
apothecary to read learned books with him at night on history and science,
he had not retained much of them. As a rule he lived in the world
immediately about him, and let the things of the moment impinge on him, and
fall off again as they would, without much reflection. But tonight on the
kopje he fell to thinking, and his thoughts shaped themselves into
connected chains.

He wondered first whether his mother would ever get the letter he had
posted the week before, and whether it would be brought to her cottage or
she would go to the post office to fetch it. And then, he fell to thinking
of the little English village where he had been born, and where he had
grown up. He saw his mother's fat white ducklings creep in and out under