He turned and wheeled his horse, returning in the direction of their temporary campsite, intent upon getting Jameson to reduce the rest period even further, and get them on the road as soon as possible. The one boy looked at the other, his eyes twinkling.
“Nasty man, isn’t he?”
“They’re all nasty men,” the second said contemptuously. “Not very smart, but nasty. Still,” he added, thinking about it, “we’d better get away from here before they come through.”
“Why? We don’t have to get away before they come,” the first boy pointed out. “Our staying will prove we didn’t lie to the man. It’s the way their heads work.” He grinned. “Besides, I’d like to see what they look like after the swamp and the ridge.”
“A lot better than they’ll look after the twin kopjes,” the other boy predicted, and also grinned. “You’re right. Let’s get a look at them,” and he settled down again, reaching for a new bit of sedge grass. The geese marched steadily across the pond, obediently followed by the goslings.
Jameson compromised on leaving the rest area at eleven in the morning, to the satisfaction of Luckner and the profound disgust of Lieutenant White. Forty-two men had died on the ridge and in the swamp; sixty-seven had been wounded, and of these, thirty-five were too badly injured to ride their mounts at the fast pace necessary to reach Johannesburg as quickly as possible. That left the captain with three hundred and four able-bodied troopers, plus thirty-two who could ride but would be of limited use in case of any running battle with the Boer commandos as they galloped along the road to Johannesburg. Still, Jameson thought, it might have been worse. At least they did have a way around Krugersdorp, thanks to Luckner. Otherwise they would have had to pause in their ride to Jo’burg to raid one or more farms for food for the men and feed for the animals, and that delay might well have proven fatal to the revolution. Now it was just a matter of time, a matter of hours.
He rode at the head of his men with Luckner beside him to point out the trail, and with his bugler and Lieutenant White behind him, and Willoughby halfway down the column of twos, beside the one surgeon they were taking, accompanying the riding wounded. The other surgeons had been left behind, to be rescued when and if possible, together with the many more seriously wounded; a flag with a prominent white cross on it had been placed in a very visible position before the abandoned campsite, and tents, similarly marked, had been set up for a hospital.
The troop was galloping at a pace that Jameson realized could not be maintained for long by the jaded horses, but once they were below Krugersdorp and well on the way to Johannesburg, he felt they could ease their pace, for they would be in territory too close to Johannesburg and the armed men there for the Boers to seriously consider an attack without threat to themselves. They turned from the trail at the shallow pan, galloping into the trail that Luckner pointed out. The two boys, Luckner was pleased to see, were still there and watching them; he felt a touch of pride that his fierce appearance had served to seal their lips where harsher methods might have failed. More than one man in the column stared at the swimming geese with more than a touch of hunger as they swept by them, but then they set their faces resolutely ahead. They had endured too much to be deterred from their goal now. They were on their way to Johannesburg, within hours of their target, and with no bloody Boer standing between them and the town. The scouts — the new scouts — had ridden past the twin kopjes and all the way to the connection with the Jo’burg road and had reported all was quiet.
It was hot, the full heat of a South African summer at high noon, and the heavy uniforms caught the perspiration of the troopers, weighing them down; the dust ate its way through the damp cloth to attack the skin beneath. It coated the dry lips and caked the edges of their eyes; it clogged their noses and abraded their ears; it worked its way into their jodhpurs and chafed the skin of their legs and thighs. The sweat of their horses made their knees slide along the flanks of their mounts, acting almost as spurs to the weary animals; they rode in a swarm of flies. They were an army of last resort, but determined to finish their dash from Pitsani in proper style and complete their mission of saving Johannesburg from the wicked Boer. They were troopers saving the Queen, and if they were saving Cecil Rhodes and his ambitions instead, it was too late to think about that.
They came around a curve in the trail, and there, less than a thousand yards away, as the two boys had promised and as the new scouts had confirmed, they could see the rounded twin kopjes with a scattering of sneezewood trees atop them, rising from the flatness of the plain. Like hairy warts on a woman’s tits, indeed, Luckner thought, grinning, and put his spurs to his mount to keep up with Jameson. The last few hours of the long three days was almost in sight; the clear road to Johannesburg lay just to the left of the pan he knew they would soon sight once they had cleared the narrow valley between the twin hills.
The leaders were well into the small valley, the troopers crowding behind, praying for sight of the final trail, the road they would ride down with pride, their shoulders back despite their hunger and their privation, into Jo’burg to face the cheering of the residents. Each man could taste his meal that evening, piled before him in unlimited quantities and enjoyed as no meal had been enjoyed before; each man disregarded the galling of his gritty uniform against his sweaty legs as he felt the bitter tang of hops in his throat at the thought of the beer he would drink that night; each man could almost feel the soft arms of one of the town’s so-called loose women thrown about him in appreciation of his having protected her virtue. And then, even as they spurred their tired horses to even greater effort, digging spurs into already blood-flecked flanks, each man froze in his saddle as he heard, above the pounding of his horse’s hooves, what he had heard once before on that fateful day.
“Skiet!”
From the rounded, breastlike hills on either side of the narrow trail on which they found themselves, the two kopjes seemed to burst into flame and smoke as the Boer commandos, waiting for them in their ambush, each rose to his knees from behind some rock, or edged his gun from behind some tree, to pour a wave of rifle fire down on the entrapped troopers. Each end of the small valley was suddenly closed as Boers took position there, down in the deep sedge grass, unable to be seen, adding additional firepower into the panicked troopers, their mounts now frenzied beyond endurance or control, churning dust as they wheeled meaninglessly in the confined space, neighing in terror, stumbling over the bodies of fellow animals down with bullet wounds in their bodies, stepping on shot troopers, trying desperately to escape the withering fire. It was chaos. Jameson found himself, almost without volition, turning to his bugler, screaming above the bedlam.
“Give me your undershirt!”
“Sir?”
Jameson pulled his horse next to the puzzled man. He leaned across his pommel, pulling the other man’s outer shirt away, ripping the undershirt from the man’s body, hastily tying it to his saber. He drove his spurs deep into his horse’s flank, forcing the terrified animal up the side of the nearest kopje, waving the saber frantically in the air.