Everything was quiet in Lindley for a few days, and then, on the 3rd of October, the General sent for me at half-past nine at night and told me that he had ordered two companies of ours, under me, to proceed at five o'clock the next morning to Wit Kop, where, apparently, some of our mounted troops were in difficulties, having been engaged with the Boers most of the day. The General also told me in confidence that he and some more troops were coming out to Wit Kop in the afternoon, and that we were to proceed on a tour round to the south and the west, and should probably be absent a week. So next morning, A and H companies, under Major O'Grady and Captain Wisden, paraded at five o'clock and went out to Wit Kop, where we found Captain Lloyd and some of the 8th M.I., and Captain Driscoll and some of his Scouts. It appeared that a party of Driscoll's Scouts had gone out towards Kaffir Kop but had not returned, and it was feared that they had been cut off; during the previous day the few men remaining at Wit Kop had been somewhat heavily fired on by a party of Boers, forty it was estimated, who had crept up under shelter of a donga to within a few hundred yards of our men, and had opened a considerable fire on them. The party on the Kop were not strong enough to turn them out, but had answered the fire and sent in a report to the General as soon as it was dark enough for a messenger to travel. With our two companies we occupied the Kop, and spent the day watching the surrounding country: Driscoll's Scouts went out and burned a farm, from which the enemy had appeared the previous day, and we sat on the Kop and stared through our field glasses at the open, undulating ground to the south-west, over which we could see some Mounted Infantry moving. Idly we followed the movements of this little party, evidently a patrol, and we watched five of them, out in front of a few others, riding in extended order across a level space of grass, when suddenly we heard the ping-boom of the Mauser: instantly the patrol wheeled about and galloped back at speed, the firing of the enemy continuing for some moments. After a while we saw some of the enemy riding away and disappearing behind a rise in the ground, to reappear once more and ride off in the distance, a little clump of men, say twenty-five at the outside. It seems that the Mounted Infantry patrol had noticed some men whom they were approaching, but took them to be the party of Driscoll's Scouts whose return we were all expecting, and so had unsuspectingly ridden towards them; with the unfortunate result that their officer, Captain Willsher, was killed, and one man wounded and taken prisoner.