Yorke had before leaving the lines again muffled his boots, and he walked along fast, feeling confident that he should get through unobserved. He was walking close to the road, and was within four or five hundred yards of the kopjes, when he took to it again, as there were some clumps of bushes in front of him. Suddenly he fell on his face with a crash, his foot having caught against a wire stretched tightly some six inches above the ground. Before he could spring to his feet a dozen men rushed out from the bushes and seized him. "Run, Peter, run!" he shouted, and then said as the Boers raised him to his feet, "I surrender." Several of them raised their rifles and faced towards the road by which he had come, thinking that he might be followed by a strong force. After waiting for three or four minutes two of them ran forward cautiously, but returned in five minutes, saying that there was no sign of any one there. "But this man shouted to someone. Whom did you shout to?" he asked Yorke roughly. Yorke shook his head. He thought it best to profess ignorance of Dutch. The man repeated the question in English. "It was a Kaffir," Yorke answered. "He was coming to show me the way across the country when we had passed through your lines." "You are a spy, then," the man said fiercely. "Not at all," Yorke replied. "If it were daylight you could see by my uniform that I am an English officer. If I had come as a spy I should have disguised myself. But I preferred coming in uniform, so that if I were captured I should have a right to be treated as a prisoner of war." "That is for the field cornet to decide," the man said grimly. "Now, come along with us." CHAPTER X AN ESCAPE Having relieved him of his rifle and bandolier, the Boers led Yorke with them along the road until they had passed the kopje, and then turned off to the left and took him to where several fires were burning at the back of the hill. A strong party of Boers were sitting round, some smoking, others eating their supper. "Whom have you got there, le Clus?" enquired one of them with a white cockade in his hat. "He says that he is a British officer, mynheer. He was coming along the road when he tumbled over our wire, and we had him in a moment." "He was walking along the road, was he?" "Yes." "Then he hardly can have been sent to spy out our position and strength," the man said. "If he had been, he would not have kept to the road. Why, he is quite a boy!" "He says he is not a spy, mynheer, but has been sent out to carry a message to the British on the Modder. He claims to be in uniform, and so to be treated as a prisoner of war." [Illustration: A STRONG PARTY OF BOERS WERE SITTING ROUND. SOME SMOKING, OTHERS EATING THEIR SUPPER.] The conversation had been in Dutch, and the field cornet then said in English to the prisoner, "Have you any papers about you?"