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Even before the feint sputtered out the rush had been made, the stratagem had developed, and at the bidding of twenty incendiary torches, the daub-and-wattle huts of the Barala town leaped skyward in one roaring conflagration. We know the glorious, unlooked-for ending of that day of fire and blood.
"But though they scold and call bad names, they never come and fetch her down off the Little Kopje. Beat her when she comes in, and serve her right, the impudent little scum! But never come near the Little Kopje, because of the spook the Barala boy saw there one night when the moon was big and shining."
Then she closed the window quickly, for she heard, afar off, the gallop of a hard-ridden horse drawing nearer nearer. And she knew that Bough was coming back. He came. She heard him dismount before the door, give the horse to the sleepy Barala ostler, and let himself into the bar. She heard him clink among the glasses and bottles. She heard his foot upon the three-step stair, and on the landing.
Zulu and Barala, Celestial and Hindu, welcomed the Relief each after his own manner, and were glad and rejoiced.
The plan involved a feint from the eastward, and an attack upon that weakest spot in the girdle of Gueldersdorp's defences, the native stad. The Barala might be incorruptible; the weak spot was the native village, nevertheless.
He struck a match with a steady hand, and held the glimmering blue phosphorus-flame downwards, and saw a Kaffir girl, a servant of the Barala, who had crept out with a bow strung with twisted crocodile-gut and a sheaf of reed arrows, to try and shoot birds. The Barala, though they were sorely pinched, like their European fellow-men, did not starve. They earned pay and rations.
Fresh meat was still to be had, though the cattle and sheep of the Barala had been thinned by raids on the part of the enemy, and poor grazing. Shell and rifle-fire not infrequently spared the butcher trouble, so that your joints were sometimes weirdly shaped. But they were joints, and there was plenty of the preserved article in Kriel's Warehouse and at the Army Service Stores.
Then she shrugged her shoulders, and rang up the Head Hospital, North Veld Road. "Who you-e?" It was the sing-song voice of the Barala hall-boy. "I'm Lady Hannah Wrynche. Is the Reverend Mother on duty in the wards to-day?" "I go see. You hang-e on." Lady Hannah hung on until her small remaining stock of patience deserted her.
And so, with another challenge from a picket, posted between the Barala village and the south trenches, where many of the loyal natives are doing duty, Saxham finds himself on the perilous tongue of land that lies behind Maxim Kopje South, and where the Staff Bombproof is situated.
After that none of the servants would pass near these two graves later than sundown, and Bough welted the Barala boy with an ox-reim for scaring silly jades of women with lying tales. But then Bough avoided the spot by day as well as by night. Therefore, it became a constant place of refuge for the child, who now slept in the outhouse alone.
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