Being alone, and far from my supplies, I slept supperless that night in a deserted Boer store, for the sake of such shelter as a wall and roof might give from a keen icy wind that swept in gusts through the broken windows. I had neither overcoat nor blanket, and saw nothing to lie on but a filthy floor or the bare laths of a rickety iron bedstead. I chose the latter. Having been in the saddle from 5 in the morning until 10 at night, with the exception of necessary halts for my horse to graze, I was soon oblivious to the discomfort of that rude couch, and, for all I knew, my pillow might have been softest down instead of hard saddle-flaps. But long before daybreak the cravings of a hunger that had only been tantalised by coffee and biscuit twenty-four hours earlier awoke me to a consciousness that my limbs were aching with cold and sore from the chafing of those sharp-edged laths. Striking a light, I looked at the little thermometer attached to my wallet, and found that it registered ten degrees of frost. More sleep was not to be thought of, so I groped through the darkness to a stall only less draughty than the store I had slept in, found my horse shivering there, rubbed him down with a wisp of straw, by way of restoring his circulation and my own, and waited for the dawn. Then I found my way across vleis and spruits to where General Ian Hamilton’s force was moving off through dense mists from Cyferfontein to attack the Boer position on Riviersberg. When the rising sun dispelled those mists the Gordons and City Imperial Volunteers were spread out in thin lines stretching fan-like across a segment of the veldt, and so they went on hour after hour without finding any sign of Boers. The pangs of hunger being all-potent, I rode off in search of a farm, hoping also to come across another British column within a few miles. After an hour or more I was gladdened by the sight of Haartebeestefontein Farm standing in the midst of green mealie-patches and belted about by eucalyptus trees—the very picture of peace. At that moment four Boers drove out from the farm-yard in a well-horsed Cape cart, but made no sign at sight of me except by driving the faster. They needn’t have been in such a hurry to get away from an unarmed and famished Englishman, who had not one comrade within miles. But luckily they didn’t know.