I am not quite clear as to what a scout should look like. The typical scout of the North American Indian days, as exemplified in the person of Natty Bumpo, wore fringed buckskin and moccasins and coon-skin cap, while Texas Bill and his vivid companions had a more picturesque costume still, in which great silver-studded saddles and jingling spurs and monstrous revolvers bore a conspicuous part. I must confess that my own nine sportsmen were scrubby-looking fellows compared to their picturesque predecessors at the game. (The khaki trousers issued by an administration which was always more practical than picturesque do not lend themselves, in this generation at any rate, to romance.) But they were a hard and useful lot, much sunburnt, and with gnarled, scarred hands. Deerslayer himself probably could not have taught them much about their own veld craft. Every one was South African born; three of them were younger sons of loyal Boer farmers. One was a coloured boy, a quiet, capable fellow. He was with us nominally as a sort of groom, but his civil manners and extraordinary capacity soon won him an accepted place in the scouts; though he rode and ate with us, he always sat a little apart in camp. He had spent three or four years up country, where I had first come across him in fact, and had shot some amount of big game; he was excellent on spoor and had a wonderful eye for country, and I really think he was the quickest man on and off a horse, and the quickest and most brilliant shot I ever saw. He stood on the roster as Frederick Collins, but was never known by any other name than Frikkie. The commandant of the rather nondescript commando, which was officially described, I believe, as a composite regiment, had a sound idea of the value of a few competent and well-mounted scouts, and had done us very well in the matter of horse. We had been ‘on commando’ now for nearly five weeks, and had got to know our animals pretty well. During the confusion and changes of the first fortnight I had got rid of a dozen horses I saw would be of no use for our work, though suitable, no doubt, for slower troop duty, and by a cunning process of selection had got together a very serviceable lot, with four spare animals to carry kit and water on the longer trips away from the main body. Your spirited young things, though well enough to go courting on, are apt to get leg-weary and drop condition too soon on steady work, and all my mob were aged and as hard as nails. I will describe one or two of them presently.