Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland | Page 4

lit it. It might be his
friends would see it from far, and come for him early in the morning;
and wild beasts would hardly approach him while he knelt beside it;
and of the natives he felt there was little fear.
He built up the fire; and determined if it were possible to keep awake
the whole night beside it.
He was a slight man of middle height, with a sloping forehead and pale
blue eyes: but the jaws were hard set, and the thin lips of the large
mouth were those of a man who could strongly desire the material good
of life, and enjoy it when it came his way. Over the lower half of the
face were scattered a few soft white hairs, the growth of early
manhood.
From time to time he listened intently for possible sounds from the
distance where his friends might be encamped, and might fire off their
guns at seeing his light; or he listened yet more intently for sounds
nearer at hand: but all was still, except for the occasional cracking of
the wood in his own fire, and the slight whistle of the breeze as it crept
past the stones on the kopje. He doubled up his great hat and put it in
the pocket of his overcoat, and put on a little two-pointed cap his
mother had made for him, which fitted so close that only one lock of
white hair hung out over his forehead. He turned up the collar of his
coat to shield his neck and ears, and threw it open in front that the blaze
of the fire might warm him. He had known many nights colder than this
when he had sat around the camp fire with his comrades, talking of the
niggers they had shot or the kraals they had destroyed, or grumbling
over their rations; but tonight the chill seemed to creep into his very
bones.
The darkness of the night above him, and the silence of the veld about
him, oppressed him. At times he even wished he might hear the cry of a
jackal or of some larger beast of prey in the distance; and he wished

that the wind would blow a little louder, instead of making that little
wheezing sound as it passed the corners of the stones. He looked down
at his gun, which lay cocked ready on the ground at his right side; and
from time to time he raised his hand automatically and fingered the
cartridges in his belt. Then he stretched out his small wiry hands to the
fire and warmed them. It was only half past ten, and it seemed to him
he had been sitting here ten hours at the least.
After a while he threw two more large logs on the fire, and took the
flask out of his pocket. He examined it carefully by the firelight to see
how much it held: then he took a small draught, and examined it again
to see how much it had fallen; and put it back in his breast pocket.
Then Trooper Peter Halket fell to thinking.
It was not often that he thought. On patrol and sitting round camp fires
with the other men about him there was no time for it; and Peter Halket
had never been given to much thinking. He had been a careless boy at
the village school; and though, when he left, his mother paid the village
apothecary to read learned books with him at night on history and
science, he had not retained much of them. As a rule he lived in the
world immediately about him, and let the things of the moment
impinge on him, and fall off again as they would, without much
reflection. But tonight on the kopje he fell to thinking, and his thoughts
shaped themselves into connected chains.
He wondered first whether his mother would ever get the letter he had
posted the week before, and whether it would be brought to her cottage
or she would go to the post office to fetch it. And then, he fell to
thinking of the little English village where he had been born, and where
he had grown up. He saw his mother's fat white ducklings creep in and
out under the gate, and waddle down to the little pond at the back of the
yard; he saw the school house that he had hated so much as a boy, and
from which he had so often run away to go a-fishing, or a-bird's-nesting.
He saw the prints on the school house wall on which the afternoon sun
used to shine when he was kept in; Jesus of Judea blessing the children,
and one picture just over the door where he hung