As soon as the two Boer soldiers had passed to a distance which allowed no chance of discovery, the Californian picked his way up through the rocks to the side of an adjacent kopje, where he remained hidden for some hours. For a well man to have accomplished this feat would perhaps have been a simple matter, although it took a daring mind to conceive it; but for a man in Major Burnham’s condition to go through the mental strain and physical torture of such an escape was a remarkable performance, and it received its proper praise from both Briton and Boer. There is no man living who so admires true courage and pluck, or who so despises a coward, as does this hardy farmer-fighter; nor does he bear resentment towards a man who, like Major Burnham, fought only for the love of war. After spending several hours among the rocks, without food or water, and in the bitterly cold night air of an African winter, the scout began to drag himself towards the railroad to accomplish the task he had first set out to do. Strangely enough, when he was captured he was not searched, and he still carried in his tunic a dynamite cartridge ready for use. During the entire campaign Major Burnham never carried arms of any sort, and when he was taken, his captors, not seeing any weapons about him, probably thought that he had nothing about him of a dangerous character. For more than two miles he dragged himself over the rocky veldt until he finally reached the railroad, along which he crawled until he found a culvert. Upon this he placed the cartridge, with a fuse of a sufficient length to allow him to crawl to a place of safety. He destroyed the line, and accomplished the task he undertook, although it nearly cost him his life. He was picked up by a British patrol late that afternoon, almost dead from exposure and the effects of his wound, and was taken to the hospital, where he was confined for a fortnight before he could even walk. [Illustration: Canadian transport at a difficult drift.] This achievement is one of many performed by this same brave American during the war. Major Burnham is without doubt an exceedingly clever man on the trail; he does not know fear, and his one idea is to accomplish his end. But that does not entirely indicate the reason for his high place in the confidence of Lord Roberts; it rather comes from the fact that Englishmen know nothing of the wonderful arts of the men of the plains; and when a man is able to tell them the number of cattle in a herd, and the number of men guarding it, or the number of men in a commando, and the condition of their horses, merely by examining the ground over which they have passed, they consider it little short of a miracle. Neither the officer nor the private soldier has had any of the training of the latent faculties which is so thorough among the officers and men of our army.