Five minutes later we had passed the outlying pickets of the Transvaal Scottish, and were kicking up the sand at a good hand-canter along the hill-girt railway line to Kolmanskuppe. There is a peculiar exhilaration in this form of sport (I cannot easily use the term "warfare" in regard to a game wherein all that is ordinarily known as "patriotism" is swallowed up and lost in a wholesome, primal, man's desire to hunt man--the royalist of royal game--for the sake, only, of the game's lust), and if in G.S.W. we were rather like the famous American hunter who had never been known to kill anything, but who "just hunted"--well, such little killing as did come our way proved conclusively that "just hunting" held all the breathless joy of the thing and left no--aftertaste. For some miles we held our pace, and the heavy, springless sand through which we rode flung its yellow veil about us. There was the sound of wind in our ears, and the creaking of saddle-leather, a vague surging noise, as of a heavy ground-swell sucking through rocks, and, over all, the choking, blinding pall of dust. An oath, back-flung from a leading section where a horse had stumbled, sounded smothered and unreal. Now and again an outcrop of bare granite would leap out to meet us, and the brief thunder of our passing would shout back from the echoing hills; then sand again, and its muffled tumult. IV--STORY OF THE TROOPERS ON TRAIL OF THE AMBUSHERS The valley became narrower, and a hint of coolness stole down the sudden shadows. All on a moment a swift hand plucked the sunlight from us, and the jaws of the hills closed suddenly about our path--closed, closed, until the ribbon of steel that we knew to be the railway line looked like a tongue lolling from the cleft grin before us. There was a silence in that place, and our horses pricked quick, apprehensive ears to it. "What a place for an ambush!" said some one of my section, and the angry "Don't be a fool!" of the man to whom he had spoken showed that three of us, at least, were thinking of the same thing. The click of a steel-shod hoof striking against stone, and--"click!" back would come the answer of the rocks; just the sort of noise that the bolt of a Mauser rifle makes when it is drawn back to ----. Well, speaking personally, I do not suppose that I should have noticed it if my horse hadn't jumped so. It was here, or hereabouts, that our patrol had been fired on only a few hours before, and we had received no particular assurance that ours was not likely to be a similar experience. On the contrary, every breathing instant was pregnant with possibility, and, be it said, a sort of half-shrinking hope.