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The train might have stopped, a searchlight might have thrown its piercing gleam over your waiting band, and a volley from a battery of maxims might have strewn the shuddering veld with your palpitating bodies!" "Oh, no danger of that!" replied Scheepers lightly; "we knew there were no Graphic artists on board!"
Surrounded at Scheepers Nek by many hundreds of riflemen in a difficult country, there was no alternative but a surrender, and so sharp and sudden was the Boer advance that the whole action was over in a very short time. The new tactics of the Boers, already used at Vlakfontein, and afterwards to be successful at Brakenlaagte and at Tweebosch, were put in force.
Smuts noticed and encouraged the promising movement and returned to the Zuurberg, out of which, however, he was soon hustled. He went away to join a rebel leader named Scheepers, who had been working freely 200 miles away to the S.W. in the districts bordering the sea.
Moreover, some of our horses had to be left behind, being too exhausted to go any further. We marched on towards Bethulie. When in the neighbourhood of this town, and of the farm of "Klein Bloemfontein," I fell in with General Piet Fourie and Captain Scheepers, and took them with me.
I can assure the Secretary for the Colonies that Scheepers is an amiable and harmless young man, who would probably now be teaching a Sunday-school class had Joseph not been such a dreamer. "Well, Scheepers," I said, "so I am to accompany you to-morrow. Can you supply me with a horse?" "That will be difficult," he replied, "but if money can buy one you shall have it." This seemed good enough.
At Doorndraai I left behind me a few waggons, with twenty men to guard them. I had previously stationed a hundred burghers there, with the object of keeping in touch with the enemy. The information which Captain Scheepers had gained while scouting was amply sufficient to show me how the land lay.
Haig had for the moment driven Scheepers back from the extreme southerly point which he had reached, and he was now in the Graaf-Reinet district; but on the other side of the colony Conroy had appeared near Kenhart, and upon May 23rd he fought a sharp skirmish with a party of Border Scouts.
Early the next morning the commando was on the march. Scheepers had kept his word and sent me a horse. It was not an attractive animal outwardly, being of an indefinite shade between white and grey, and with an unnecessary profusion of projections adorning its attenuated frame.
It is rather from a wish to give a proof of his undaunted courage that I quote his words. "Are you afraid of things like that?" he asked, when Scheepers had given my message. "Just you go and shoot them down, and catch them when they run." At Paardenberg's Drift there were some Free-Staters' camps that stood apart from the others.
Seven killed and seventeen wounded were the British losses in this spirited engagement. On July 10th General French, surveying from a lofty mountain peak the vast expanse of the field of operations, with his heliograph calling up responsive twinkles over one hundred miles of country, gave the order for the convergence of four columns upon the valley in which he knew Scheepers to be lurking.
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