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Far away across the veldt, a tiny spurt of dust twirled up into the air and came spinning towards them like a huge, translucent top. Gaining momentum as it spun along and picking up more dust as it advanced, it came whirling onward, rising high and higher until it swept down on them, a huge, khaki-colored, balloon-like mass.
The Manchesters and Gordons on the right seemed to be swallowed by the veldt. Then between the bangs of their artillery struck the hoarser bay of our own. Ball after ball of white smoke alighted on the kopje the first at the base, the second over, the third jump on the Boer gun. By the fourth the Boer gun flashed no more.
There was no risk of meeting with any impediment, for the veldt from the old fortress right away to the place where I had marked down the wagons was a smooth, undulating plain.
At this time the indomitable chief, McMillan, was laid up with veldt sores on the legs, unable to walk or even to ride except in a litter. Promptly, however, he despatched Lieutenant Fairfax and William Marlow, with about thirty more men, to Brown's support, with orders never to quit till he got the murderer. By a forced march, Fairfax reached Brown at four in the afternoon.
The features of this country and the way the long, undulating slopes of the veldt merge into each other are extremely perplexing, and as an engagement may be carried on over many miles of ground and your own movements may be extensive and involved, it becomes very difficult, in fact to most people absolutely impossible, to remember the lie of the land and how the various hills and slopes are related to each other.
As heavy rains were falling we bivouacked not far from the river. There in the veldt, without any shelter, we spent a miserable night, for we were exposed to incessant showers, which drenched us to the very skin. But there was something even worse in store for us the following day.
Whenever in after days Sylvia looked back upon her marriage, it seemed to be wrapped in a species of hazy dream like the early mists on that far-off range of hills. They did not go again to Ritzen, but to a town of greater importance further down the line, a ride of nearly forty miles across the veldt.
And now, with a strip of linen tied round his head, a ragged cotton shirt, a pair of "shorts" that were hardly any protection from the thorny cacti, and a pair of badly-worn "veldt schoen" as the sum total of his clothing and footgear von Gobendorff awaited the fall of night in the depths of a tropical forest.
"From the veldt we took our surrendered friends to the village. The wounded were placed in the local hospital, and the officers found lodgings for the night in an hotel. "I escorted Spragge to the village. On the way he had a long talk with me about the war, and wished to know why the Free State had cast in her lot with the Transvaal.
Most of the members of the expedition remained as settlers, and farms sprang up on the veldt. The Company had to organize a police force to patrol the land and keep off predatory natives. But this was purely incidental to the larger troubles that now crowded thick and fast. In the South the Boers launched an expedition to occupy Matabeleland by force and it had to be headed off.
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