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"On the Firing Line"

Weldon, you must include our meeting in your
scheme of things," she said, with a smile.
His answering smile met her smile with perfect frankness.
"I sometimes wonder if that wasn't the most inevitable part of it
all."


CHAPTER TWELVE

The red-brown veldt stretched away to the sky-line, sixty miles
distant. Level as it looked, it was nevertheless a succession of
softly rolling ridges dotted with clumps of dried sagebrush and
spotted here and there with heaps of black volcanic rocks. Far to
the northward, a thin line of poplars and willows marked the bed of
a river. Beyond that, again, the air was thick with smoke from acres
of burning veldt. The days were full of dust, and the nights were
full of frost; it was the month of June, and winter was upon the
land.
The camp was taking a well-earned rest. For days, the men had swept
over the veldt, following hard on the trail of a Boer general who
only made himself visible now and then by a spatter of bullets, when
his convoy train was delayed at a difficult ford. It had been a week
of playing pussin-the-corner over a charred and dusty land, where
the only roads were trails trodden out to powder by the hoofs of
those that had gone before.


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