"Yes, but you did not do it," Yorke said with a smile. "We suffered heavily from blundering up against your trenches, of whose existence we knew nothing; but there was no annihilation about it. It is the opinion of many that if we had pushed forward all along the line in the afternoon, we should have won the position; at any rate, your men were very careful not to make a counter attack." "We are only waiting for Ladysmith and Kimberley to fall," the Boer said; "then we shall all advance into Cape Colony, break up the railways, and, joined by the whole of the Dutch people, sweep all before us to Cape Town." "It is a good programme," Yorke agreed; "but neither Ladysmith nor Kimberley have fallen yet." "They cannot hold out much longer," the man replied. "When the people of Kimberley learn that help has failed to come to them, they will not be fools enough to starve any longer. As for Ladysmith, it is as good as taken; the garrison cannot hold out many days longer. Then Joubert will advance with his whole army, and drive Buller down to the ships at Durban." "Well, we shall see," Yorke said. "We are not likely to convince each other. Where do you send your prisoners to?" "To Pretoria. A good many of them are already there--seven or eight hundred from Natal, six hundred from Stormberg--and this is only the beginning. We have a few others we picked up here; I expect you will all be sent off in a day or two. I don't think you will be badly off at first; but when we get Buller's men and the men here, safely stowed away, you will hardly be as well off, for I should say that there will be a difficulty in getting provisions for twenty thousand men or so. But perhaps there won't be so many, for I hear that we have killed over twenty thousand, and we have only lost twenty or thirty men." "But I should think that at least you here cannot believe the last item," Yorke said. "Something like a hundred bodies have been fished out of the Modder, and there is no doubt that a still greater number were carried off the field. I don't say that you lost as heavily as we did; but when I say that you had two hundred killed, without counting Magersfontein, I feel sure that I am under the mark." "Oh! there may be some mistake about the thirty," the Boer said with a grim smile. "Still, you have certainly lost a great many more than we have; even at Belmont and Graspan, though you did turn us out of our kopjes, you lost at least five to our one." "That may be true enough. But a force attacking across the open must always lose more than men who shoot them down from behind rocks, and who have their horses close by on which they can gallop away as soon as they find that they are getting the worst of it. If we ever get you in the open I fancy that your losses will be as heavy as ours." "We should be fools if we let you," the Boer said. "We are too slim for that. We fight on our own ground."