At
That Hour By The Light Of Three Paper Lanterns We Tried To Saddle
Eighteen Horses, Donkeys, And Ponies, And The Sole Object Of Each Was
To Kick The Light Out Of The Lantern Nearest Him.
We finally rode
off through a darkness that was lightened only by a gray, dripping
fog, and in a
Silence broken only by the patter of rain upon the corn
that towered high above our heads and for many miles hemmed us in.
After an hour, Sataki, the teacher who acted as our guide, lost the
trail and Captain Lionel James, of the Times, who wrote "On the Heels
of De Wet," found it for him. Sataki, so our two other keepers told
us, is an authority on international law, and he may be all of that
and know all there is to know of three-mile limits and paper
blockades, but when it came to picking up a trail, even in the bright
sunlight when it lay weltering beneath his horse's nostrils, we
always found that any correspondent with an experience of a few
campaigns was of more general use. The trail ended at a muddy hill,
a bare sugar-loaf of a hill, as high as the main tent of a circus and
as abruptly sloping away. It was swept by a damp, chilling wind; a
mean, peevish rain washed its sides, and they were so steep that if
we sat upon them we tobogganed slowly downward, ploughing up the mud
with our boot heels.
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