"I want it to carry these wounded men to within reach of their friends. Which is the nearest drift?" "Vant's Drift, and it is there, no doubt, that the party crossed. It is a little more than two miles away." "Then we will place the wounded in the cart, and you might send one of your Kaffirs with it to the drift and stick up a pole with a sheet on it; they are sure to have halted on the other side, and will guess that there are wounded in it. As soon as the Kaffir comes within two or three hundred yards of the river he can take the horses out and return. I dare say he will be back again before you are off." The cart was driven along the line that the Boers had taken, the wounded being carefully lifted and placed in it as it reached them. Two more were found dead and three wounded some distance beyond the spot where the searchers had turned, having fallen nearly a mile from the farm; the lads who accompanied the cart then returned. Long before they reached the house the horses had been brought down. The settler and his Kaffirs were hard at work loading the stores into two ox-waggons. The lads all lent their assistance, and in less than an hour the settlers started for Ladysmith, the women and children in the wagon, and the men on horseback driving their herds with the aid of the Kaffirs. After a hearty adieu, Chris and his party rode on together for some little distance before again scattering widely to recommence their work of scouting. Hitherto they had been too busy for conversation, but now they were able to give words to the satisfaction they all felt at their success. "It has been splendid!" Sankey said enthusiastically. "We have defeated a force twice as strong as ourselves, have killed or badly wounded eighteen of them, and you may be sure that of those that got away several must have been hit. Not one of us has a scratch." "Splendid!" another exclaimed. "It could not have been better managed. I think we ought to give three cheers for Chris." Three rousing cheers were given. "After this, Chris," Carmichael said, "I don't think you need talk any more about resigning the command. General Symons himself could not have done better." "I think, at any rate, we have begun to wipe off old scores," Chris said. "We have paid for a few of the insults the ladies had to submit to as we came along, and I am heartily glad that we were in time to do it. We have baulked them of the haul they expected to make, and saved something like a thousand head of cattle for the colony, to say nothing of preventing these people from being absolutely ruined. It is only a pity that we had not our horses with us. If we had, not many of the Boers would have recrossed the river. But we could not have taken them with us without being detected before we got into position, and in that case we might have had a hard fight, and matters would probably have turned out altogether differently."