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And the compliments became sterner whenever the Matabele recognised in the little force of whites the dread "Wolf that never Sleeps." "Wolf! Wolf!" they shrieked with savage ferocity, and if Baden-Powell had the nerves of some of us he must have had many a bad night after hearing that yell, and marking the gleaming eyes and the frothing lips that twitched with lust for his destruction.
Baden-Powell, not being able to rid himself of the explosive by firing it, arranged that it should be fired by the enemy. He loaded it on railway trucks, which he propelled a few miles out of the town and then abandoned. There was no Laocoon to warn the Boers, and they rushed at what they thought was an armoured train in trouble.
And to Cronje's humanitarian plea that Baden-Powell should surrender in order to avoid further bloodshed, the Goal-Keeper made answer, one can see his eyes twinkling, "Certainly, but when will the bloodshed begin?"
To this they agreed, so I indited the following letter, couched in terms which the secretary might peruse: "December 2, 1899. "I am at the laager. General Snyman will not give me a pass unless Colonel Baden-Powell will exchange me for a Mr. Petrus Viljoen. I am sure this is impossible, so I do not ask him formally.
It was all on a par with her Baden-Powell and the long 38 Colt's. At any rate, she did not look the part. And that was what he could not forgive. Had she been short-haired, heavy-jawed, large-muscled, hard- bitten, and utterly unlovely in every way, all would have been well. Instead of which she was hopelessly and deliciously feminine. Her hair worried him, it was so generously beautiful.
Drill in pyjamas every morning prevented B.-P. from putting on flesh, and that drill, especially "Knees Up!" seems to have been of a pretty severe kind, for it draws from Baden-Powell the exclamation, "I'd like to kill him who invented it but it does us all a power of good." That is the saying of the old soldier.
The end of it was that Wedza's warriors were completely bluffed by the resourceful B.-P.; they were driven out of their stronghold, and the stronghold itself blown into smithereens. During this attack Baden-Powell narrowly escaped death, a small party he was with being fired upon at close range by a number of the enemy hidden behind a ridge of rocks.
Apart from his breeding and training, which would effectually prevent a man from committing the unpardonable sin of the social world, Baden-Powell by nature was, and still is, a little bashful. There are people who pooh-pooh the very idea of such a thing, and declare that the man they have heard act and sing and play the fool is no more nervous than a bishop among curates.
Then he realised that he had only been struck with a lead-covered stone fired from a big-bore gun, and so hopped off like a man who has been kicked on the shins in a football match, to continue the game. No blood was drawn by this bullet, but our hero's thigh was black and blue for many days afterwards. This was the kind of life Baden-Powell lived at this time as Chief of the Staff.
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