The darkness of the night above him, and the silence of the veld about him, oppressed him. At times he even wished he might hear the cry of a jackal or of some larger beast of prey in the distance; and he wished that the wind would blow a little louder, instead of making that little wheezing sound as it passed the corners of the stones. He looked down at his gun, which lay cocked ready on the ground at his right side; and from time to time he raised his hand automatically and fingered the cartridges in his belt. Then he stretched out his small wiry hands to the fire and warmed them. It was only half past ten, and it seemed to him he had been sitting here ten hours at the least. After a while he threw two more large logs on the fire, and took the flask out of his pocket. He examined it carefully by the firelight to see how much it held: then he took a small draught, and examined it again to see how much it had fallen; and put it back in his breast pocket. Then Trooper Peter Halket fell to thinking. It was not often that he thought. On patrol and sitting round camp fires with the other men about him there was no time for it; and Peter Halket had never been given to much thinking. He had been a careless boy at the village school; and though, when he left, his mother paid the village apothecary to read learned books with him at night on history and science, he had not retained much of them. As a rule he lived in the world immediately about him, and let the things of the moment impinge on him, and fall off again as they would, without much reflection. But tonight on the kopje he fell to thinking, and his thoughts shaped themselves into connected chains.