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There was no escape for them save across the open. It says much for their courage that they took that perilous choice rather than wave the white flag, which would have ensured their safety. The scene which followed has not often been paralleled. About a hundred and fifty burghers rushed out of the ditches, streaming across the veld upon foot to the spot where their horses had been secreted.
Doubtless the mowers in the meadows had hidden the blades of their scythes under the swathe, and the haymakers had placed their prongs in the ditches: nothing is so likely to attract a shock of lightning as a prong carried on the shoulder with the bright steel points upwards. In the farmhouses the old folk would cover up the looking-glasses lest the quicksilver should draw the electric fluid.
Two days after his departure Roger and Higgins were measuring the acreage cleared in the elder brush when one of the blacks said suddenly: "Wha' dem man do ovah thah, Boss?" Payne glanced out over the ditched sawgrass land whither the negro was pointing and saw three men carefully picking their way along the spoil banks beside the ditches.
As I had over a mile to walk to their pitch, the poor glare of the camp fires made the darkness more inky, and I had sundry narrow escapes from tumbling into ditches and water holes. Our bivouac was an ill-omened beginning to the route march of the column under Colonel Martin. One of the periodical summer gales came on, raising whirlwinds of dust and sand.
"For," said he, "you will soon be at man's estate, and you cannot too early begin to imitate their example." When they had eaten as much as they liked, they got up, and pursued their walk through gardens separated from one another only by small ditches, which marked out the limits without interrupting the communication; so great was the confidence the inhabitants reposed in each other.
They had pressed in, talking eagerly, laughing, and rejoicing that the wild night ride proposed by Cordula von Montfort, which had led over dark forest paths, lighted only by a stray moonbeam, and often across fields and ditches and through streams, had ended without mischance to man or beast.
Between unbridged streams with high banks, ditches, and deep ruts which caught our wheels and would not let them go, our progress was much impeded; but we toiled on. At one place we were happily helped by a company of Sepoys, whose medical officer was a dear Christian friend. In other places we were extricated by the help of villagers.
Cross-roads to be twenty feet broad, and ditches proportioned; no lanes and passes less than nine feet without ditches.
"An ignis fatuus that bewitches, And leads men into pools and ditches." Yet I confess that it burns steady and clear, as though it came from lamp, candle, rushlight, lanthorn, or other human agency. 'Where there is light there is life, cried Reuben. 'Let us make for it, and see what chance of shelter we may find there. 'It cannot come from our dragoon friends, remarked Decimus.
Dashing against the southern hillside, these marching columns dissolved in torrents that Ruth could hear roaring down from the tree-tops and rushing in miniature floods through the forest. The road was all awash. The cars stood almost hub-deep in a yellow, foaming flood. The roadside ditches were not deep here, and the sudden freshet was badly guttering the highway.
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