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Saligao Sunday, the 1st of July, was an unusually bright day for the normally dull, wet, cloudy rainy season. I was looking forward to going to Saligao to see an exhibition of plants and was glad for the dry weather as I pedalled the 20 minutes it took to reach Lourdes Convent, the well known school in the village where the exhibition was being held. I reached around 10.30 in the morning.
Jackson was easy-going with his family, but occasionally his foot came down like a steam-hammer, as witness the Wrykyn school report affair. So Mike pedalled along rapidly, being wishful to get the job done without delay. Psmith had yielded up the key, but his inquiries as to why it was needed had been embarrassing.
Entering this establishment, the only thing the woman can produce besides candy and raisins is a box of brown, wafer-like biscuits, the unsubstantial appearance of which is, to say the least, most unsatisfactory to a person who has pedalled his breakfastless way through eleven kilometres of slippery clay.
This explanation, like the others, was quite simple when one had heard it, though it gave me material for much thought as we pedalled on along the dark road, with Thorndyke's light flickering in front, and the dogcart pattering in our wake. But there was ample time for reflection; for our pace rather precluded conversation, and we rode on, mile after mile, until my legs ached with fatigue.
So if you could have seen the road, just outside of Couilly, Thursday morning, just after nine, you would have seen a Southern girl sitting in a high cart facing east, and an elderly lady in a donkey cart facing west, and the two of them watching the road ahead for the coming of a bicycle pedalled by a gendarme with a gun on his back, as they talked like magpies.
The evening was fine and warm without being stuffy, one of those evenings which are the peculiar glory of the early English summer. It seemed to me that many thousands of people were passing along that road towards the country. Parties of laughing boys and girls pedalled northwards on bicycles, swerving in and out through the traffic.
Once, twice, it rang out. The loud ping of a rifle! Looking behind us, we saw eight or ten mounted Matabele! Stalwart warriors they were half naked, and riding stolen horses. They were coming our way! They had seen us! They were pursuing us! "Put on all speed!" I cried, in my agony. "Hilda, can you manage it?" She pedalled with a will. But, as we mounted the slope, I saw they were gaining upon us.
Jack had an ecstatic ten minutes, the final round putting him in the seventh heaven of enjoyment. "All I could make out was Acton's white arms mixed with Alabama's black ones, and the sand flying in all directions. Stunning isn't the word for it!" As Acton and young Bourne pedalled leisurely home for roll call, Jack said
Peggy comforted herself in the certainty that this would be the case, the while she pedalled home as fast as wheels would take her. But she was mistaken in her surmises.
For over two weeks he had been on the hunt of Uhlan patrols. Another schipperke he, who could not only hate but fight as best he knew how. "We had an alarm," he said. "Have you heard anything?" When we told him no, he pedalled on more slowly, and oh, how wearily! to the front. Rather pitiful that, too, when you thought of what was "out there."
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