At Fort Brown, whither the dead and wounded had been conveyed, we found a fatigue party digging graves for those who had fallen. The waggons which had been brought off, riddled with balls, stood in the square. From Captain Moody, R.E., the officer commanding the party at the time of the attack, I had a full account of the affair. It appeared that when nearly half way up the Hill, a volley was suddenly fired on the escort, from the bush on the lower side, into the advance guard, killing four of them at once. The attack then became general, the Sappers fighting gallantly under their Captain, making a fresh stand as they were driven from waggon to waggon, till overpowered by numbers, and having seven killed and nine wounded out of thirty, they were forced to retreat to an empty house near the ruins of the old Koonap Post. There they barricaded themselves, and remained for about an hour, when relief arrived from Fort Brown, where the sound of the firing had given the alarm to the garrison. On their arrival the whole party returned to the scene of disaster, and scoured through the bush on both sides the road, but the rebels had decamped with all they could carry off, including ammunition and Minié Rifles, which, however, had fortunately been rendered useless by the precaution of removing the nipples. Among the badly wounded was the wife of one of the soldiers who had been killed; she died during the night at the ruins, leaving three orphan children behind her, for whom a subscription was got up on the spot by the officers at the Fort. Many of the enemy, who were principally rebel Hottentots, had been killed in the skirmish. After a long, hot, and dusty canter with the post-riders, through the Ecca valley, I off-saddled, by a train of waggons outspanned on the green flats of Botha's Hill, to give my horse a roll, as he had now carried me nearly ninety miles, with only a short time for baiting at three places. The moment a Cape horse is off-saddled he rolls himself on the ground,--mud, rock, sand, or grass all alike; kicks up his heels in the air, rubs his neck and face on the earth, more like a dog than a horse; and after a shake is ready for the road again, and as fresh as if he had had a feed of corn. Whilst my steed thus enjoyed himself and nibbled the short burnt up grass, I squatted under the friendly shade of a waggon, joining a hospitable old Boer at his meal of _biltong_ and brown bread, and then jogged leisurely along for the next six miles over the open plain to Graham's Town.